Europe > Ireland > East Coast Ireland > Dublin > Articles > The Land of Heart's Desire

“The health of the salmon to you — a sound heart and a wet mouth.”
Ancient Irish toast

Ireland. Land of saints and scholars, sinners and Guinness. Where else could you drive through a green-on-green landscape, looking for somewhere like Tubbercurry or Ballygally and end up instead in Ringaskiddy or Ballylickey – and not mind at all?

This is, as William Butler Yeats wrote, “the land of heart's desire.” The poet was speaking of his beloved County Sligo, but the description fits almost anywhere in Ireland, even Dublin. For visitors, the centre of gravity of the Irish Republic’s capital is around St Stephen’s Green, Grafton Street and Temple Bar, where walking is more than the done thing, it is the only thing.

Pull on your shoes and stroll along the dogleg streets, from pub to pub to restaurant, or the Liffey River quayside — again, from pub to pub to restaurant. Dublin has a score of cool clubs and bars (not to mention worthy museums and uplifting cathedrals) and so does every other city in Europe. Instead why not immerse yourself in something unique, the grand Irish tradition of music and convivial mayhem that is the pub-on-the-corner? There’s the Oliver St John Gogarty or the Temple Bar (on the cobbled way of the same name) or the Adams Trinity Bar on Dame Street. Or James Joyce’s old hangout, Davy Byrnes pub. Or literally a thousand others.

A few decades ago Ireland figured out how to dexterously jiggle the European Union’s subsidy-laden purse strings — or so some Irish tell me — and thus began its reversal of fortune. In the 1990s the newly cashed-up country, whose main exports previously had been genes and forlorn stories, found itself as the magnet for a reverse diaspora of talent, technology and capital, which in turn begat more prosperity and soon earned Ireland the pop economist’s tag of "Celtic Tiger." Dublin became prosperous, even groovy. Today it offers you a swag of flash restaurants and good hotels.

For a taste of tradition, ritual high tea in the Lord Mayor’s Lounge in the venerable Shelbourne Hotel is a must. Two of the city’s most notable contemporary restaurants are the alarmingly named but highly acclaimed Bang (on Merrion Row) and nearby in the beautiful Merrion Hotel, the pricey, Michelin two star establishment, Guilbaud’s. The more moderately priced Ely (on Ely Place) offers a menu that ranges from Irish stew to “organic banger and mash,” all washed down by a nice range of wines by the glass. You’ll find very good accommodation at the Liffey-side Clarence Hotel (owned by U2), the Merrion and the elegant Westin, or more economically, at the funky, ornate Adams Trinity.

Dublin is almost a pocket country in itself, replete with literature (of course) and scholarship, pubs and churches, music and, yes, a touch of melancholy. And statutes. The Irish have littered their landscape with so many metal memorials that it’s like a new Bronze Age. In the capital the locals have then honoured their heroes with entirely irreverent nicknames. The large and famous bronze of Molly Malone – hawker by day and hooker by night – standing beside her barrow on College Street, is known as “the tart with a cart”, while a perky Oscar Wilde, semi-reclining on a rock in Merrion Square, is “the fag on a crag.” You’ll also find “the dick with a stick” and “the floozy in the jacuzzi,” and so on. Needless to say, if you’re here in search of a politically correct country, you haven’t yet found it.

As the capital of heart’s desire, Dublin could take up your whole visit, but peel yourself away and head north, indeed to Northern Ireland, to Antrim. It might sound like an antibiotic but its coves and glens are redolent with a history of monks, lords, saints and shipwrecks. Alternately wind-whipped and breeze-caressed, Antrim rains sunshine or whisky with equal whim. Bushmills, the oldest licensed distillery in the world, has been here since 1608 when King James I allowed one Sir Thomas Phillips to produce uisce beatha, “the water of life.” This being Ireland, that claim is of course keenly disputed: Lockes Distillery in County Louth also proclaims itself as the oldest licensed still anywhere. When Irish lies are smiling you never let facts get in the way of a free drink. Accordingly, you join a tour of the Old Bushmills Distillery.

After four centuries of bottling “the mist”, Bushmills know exactly what visitors want. Whipping our group past mash tuns and alembic condensers, the guide points us towards the main event, the tasting room. A dozen different liquors are offered for us to identify, savour — and swallow. “I’m a teetotaller, meself,” declares the middle-aged Belfast woman seated opposite me. Working her way deftly through the full range of single and blended malt Irish whiskies, as well as Scotch and Bourbon varieties, the lady slaps down her final glass and declares, “Ten year-old Irish single malt’s still my favourite! Another wee one, thanks.”

The Antrim coast is giddy with history. Over there is a banshee-wracked 16th century clifftop ruin, Castle Dunluce — struck by lightning during a feast, its kitchen, along with cooks, food and all, toppled into the sea. Further on is bleak Tor Head from where, in 1901, Guglielmo Marconi made the first-ever radio transmissions — you can almost hear the static. The misty headland glimpsed across the water is Scotland’s Mull of Kintyre — you can almost hear Paul McCartney counting out the royalties. And back west a little way is Inishowen Peninsula, the northernmost point of Ireland which, in defiance of cartography and commonsense, is not in Northern Ireland at all but in “the South”, the Republic of Ireland.

“For 30 years Belfast was known for all the wrong reasons,” says local man Ken McElroy as he shows us around his hometown, the capital of UK-ruled Northern Ireland, which is now recovering from decades of urban civil war. “But at least everyone knows where we are,” he adds. These days you can safely wander Belfast’s once-infamous zones like Falls Road and Shankill Road and check out the strident, tribal murals of the Irish Republican Army and their opponents, the Ulster Defence Force and other groups. Gone are the checkpoints, the British troops, razor wire and “hard men” fanatics, replaced by shoppers and sightseers.

We drive past an exclusive boy’s school. “The famous writer Samuel Beckett taught there until he was sacked,” says Ken. “The headmaster told him not to mark the exam papers so harshly because, after all, these boys were ‘the cream of Belfast youth.’ To which Beckett answered, ‘Yes. Rich, thick and full of clots’.’’

Belfast’s ornate old watering holes like Flannigans Bar, Fibber McGees and Morrisons Spirit Grocers are treasure troves of “snugs”, tiling, stained glass, garrulous tongues and a thousand hangovers-in-waiting. Don’t miss a pint and a natter in one of these Irish national heritage sites. (After which you’ll never again bother with the franchised, so-called “Irish Pub” with a faux-Paddy name that just opened alongside your local Starbucks.) As well as a city of pubs, Belfast remains a city of churches, although the Irish will assure you that “nowhere is so much Christianity preached and so little practiced” as in their own land. But that’s Belfast, if not all Ireland: a paradox of faith and fatalism wrapped up in a quip.

The Irish, you note after about ten minutes in their country, love joking. In particular, they love joking about Americans. Consider 70-room Castle Leslie, at Glaslough, County Monaghan, where you can dine in luxury and sleep in fusty, aristocratic splendour. “We know when tourist season has started,” says manager Samantha Leslie. “Around mid-May there’ll be a buzz on the intercom and some American voice will say, ‘Hi! I think we’re related. My wife’s first name is Lesley’.”

You can chase laughs, pints, saints, statues, golf balls, cathedrals — or almost anything else under the sun — on your journey through Ireland. One thing that is inescapable is literature and writers. Across County Sligo the cash registers trill to the memory of Nobel Laureate WB Yeats (just as Dublin’s tills do for James Joyce). At Drumcliffe, in the graveyard of St Columba’s chapel, scores of visitors daily come to see the headstone of the poet (who died in 19439) and his wife, Georgina. Our guide coyly overlooks their age discrepancy, as carved on the headstone. It seems that Yeats married a woman 27 years his junior. “Not a woman, really,” opines a Dublin tourist next to me, “Just a wee lass of fifteen. And on the same day he proposed to her, he’d proposed to her mother, too. Tsk.”

“Yes, he was a great poet but a daft individual. The great Irish silly-billy.” Yeatsian scholar Aengus Cantwell tells us over dinner. He moves on to wax lyrical about the mythic Irish landscape that surrounds us. “It’s like a manuscript we have lost the skill to read, but where you can sense, as Yeats said, that ‘the other world seems but a step away’.” That other world — be it of fairy rings and Druid mounds, or of darker facts like “coffin ships” full of famine emigrants — is a layer you sense when travelling rural Ireland.

Driving here is disconcerting fun. The Irish Republic is officially bilingual, as are the road-signs: this allows you to become lost simultaneously in Gaelic and English. No worry. En route, you’ll think that place names like Ballymoney, Ballygally and Balleyheige have been put there to keep you laughing while lost.

At the far southern tip of Ireland island is verdant County Cork (with more improbable places names like Ballinspittle and New Twopothouse). It is indeed beautiful, with dense forests, little postage-stamp farms, emerald green pastures, crumbling castles and weather that’s like Melbourne multiplied by ten - 40 seasons in one day. You soon accept the equation: it is Ireland, it is raining. And because it is Ireland, within ten minutes it is also not raining. As the locals will tell you, “We applied for membership of the Third World but were turned down because of our weather.” If you’re on both a romantic and cultural quest, don’t miss Cork City which will become European Capital of Culture for 2005. Some E (euros) 200 million are being poured into the city for the year’s numerous events. According to Cork 2005’s press manager, Aoife Carlin, "What you’ll see here is a wonderful, simultaneous cultural snapshot of Cork, and Ireland, and Europe." The city will host some 40 major events, with highlights including a Month of Childhood (July); Relocations, a major series of European outdoor theatre productions; Oceans to City, the largest rowing race ever to take place in Ireland, from the Atlantic up the Lee River into the heart of the city; and Eighteen Turns, described as a "serpentine architectural gallery pavilion" designed by NYC Ground Zero architect Daniel Libeskind. ¹l Sweet talk and quick kisses are the big thing at Blarney Castle. True, visiting this 15th century pile (eight kilometres north of Cork) is an A-1 tourist cliché, but lovers (of language, at least) shouldn’t miss it. ¹l Clamber up the castle’s spiral staircase and test Queen Elizabeth I’s notion that kissing the Blarney Stone bestows on the pasher a devilishly enhanced capacity for “pleasant talk, intended to deceive without offending.” To kiss this fabled rock first you must lie, arched backwards, leaning out from the castle’s parapet with a 27-metre drop below. An attendant (who’s the spitting image of Joh Bjelke-Petersen) holds you while you plant a quick one on the venerable stone. But, be warned. You won’t become one iota more charming or witty. The whole thing is an Irish joke - Ireland’s revenge on the world for all those Irish jokes we’ve told.

True to Queen Bess’s word, the Blarney Stone has succeeded for centuries in “deceiving without offending.” Long ago Ireland’s tourism boffins realised that their weather would never beat Tahiti’s or anywhere else’s. Certainly they had green by the bucketful, along with the rain that enabled it, but most of their villages and towns were brown studies in grey. This called for a miracle in a paint can. The hitherto drab buildings ‘came out’ wearing, for instance, a lime green façade with a cherry red awning, a mauve door with yellow frame, blue walls with - you get the picture. Bright. Very bright. These days you pull into a town like Cobh, Kenmare or Glengarriff and find a row of Victorian-Edwardian shopfronts that look as though Victoria and Edward, along with Gilbert and Sullivan, had painted the town red (plus orange and fuscia) after a big night on the port and laudanum. Sounds dreadful. Looks joyous.

Colour schemes notwithstanding, Ireland welcomes you with some very tasteful accommodation, particularly in its upmarket manors, country houses and castles. Among the top ones are Castle Leslie (where Paul McCartney held his second wedding), the Park Hotel and Sheen Falls Lodge (in Kenmare, County Kerry) and Hayfield Manor (Cork City). With 400 golf courses, Ireland is also the land of links and fairways; not surprisingly, some of the very best accommodation comes complete with attached championship golf course, such as at the illustrious K Club (County Kildare) and the grand Adare Manor (County Limerick).

After, before or instead of golf, try a spa. I found one in the castle-like Park Hotel in Kenmare that is unlike any other. Spectacular in its timber and stone design (and its view of the Sheen River), with a serene ambience and innovative treatments, the Samas Spa is so serious about true relaxation that they won¹t even accept you for a session of less than three hours. But even in a spa the Irish can¹t stay too serious for too long. At another, the terrific Thalassotherapy Spa at Inchydoney Island Lodge, near Clonakilty in Cork, a masseuse was skilfully prodding and stretching me with a combination of Thai, Swedish and Hawaiian techniques when I asked her, “Before modern spas came to Ireland, did you have a local tradition of massage?” Her answer: “Oh, probably a whack on the head with a club.”

In the land of U2 and Van Morrison, the Chieftains and Rory Gallagher, Sinead O’Connor and Christy Moore, you¹re never far from homegrown music. To hear the true Irish heartbeat, head down to the local pub on music night. Someone takes up a fiddle or the uileann pipes, someone else a bodhran drum. The singer or mandolin player might have to yell to the boisterous crew that’s raising the rafters, “We want to play - would you kindly shut up!” And they do. A hymn of resistance or exile or a tale of love confounded weaves through the clatter and laughter until it all falls silent and you find it’s not the smoke but the Ireland that’s misting your eyes.

Articles

• More from John Borthwick