Getting My Irish Up

Trying Not to Cause An International Incident While Traversing Ireland with Mom

Mom and I visit what appears to be ruins of the Flintstones’ home in rural Ireland

Growing up in the Boston area, I never dreamed I would one day want to visit Ireland. That’s because I grew up with many Irish-American kids who tended to be the kind of kids who beat up kids like me. So whereas other American youngsters might have visualized Ireland as a place where you giddily chase leprechauns in pursuit of their Lucky Charms cereal and everyone whistles with joy while showering with Irish Spring soap, I would have envisioned Ireland as a terrifying land where fully grown adults delight in giving visitors noogies, nurples and wedgies.

But then in college I took a class on Irish history that piqued my interest. I learned about the island nation’s record of brutal invasions and subjugations, first by Vikings, then by the Normans, then by the English, and then the English again, and then the English yet again, to say nothing of the frequent visits from various plagues, blights, epidemics and famines. Surveying this history I couldn’t help but wonder, did the phrase “Luck of the Irish” originate as some sort of sick joke?

So after realizing that among European nations, Ireland has always been more of a bullying victim than perpetrator, I’ve felt a kinship with the Irish people and hoped to travel to the Emerald Isle. And after many years of discussion, my wife and I finally resolved to visit Ireland as a family with our three kids and my mother this past spring. Except that this being 2022, we could never find a week when all three kids were free of commitments to school, sports, extracurricular activities or critical Minecraft competitions that are not scheduled to be concluded until the return of Halley’s Comet.

In the end my wife told me that I should just go with my mother while she stayed behind with the kids — a gesture either of great generosity and sacrifice on her part or her sneaky way of exacting retribution against me for some past transgression. Regardless, that’s how I found myself, a middle-aged married father of three, on a recent redeye flight to Ireland accompanied only by my nearly-octogenarian mother.

May the Road Rise Up to Meet You

Arriving at the Dublin airport would have been exciting enough, but we got an additional thrill at the rental car counter when the agent told us that, because of a mix up with my driver’s license, I wouldn’t be able to drive the rental car. This meant we were facing a week ahead with my mother behind the wheel of a manual transmission vehicle as we traveled all over an unfamiliar country — and likely all over the road as well since in Ireland, they drive on the opposite side than we do.

Having secured the full complement of insurance against every possible eventuality — collision, injury, fire, leprechaun attack, etc. — we were off!

I’ll spare you my description of all the sites we visited since that information is widely available in well-researched travel guides, but I will note a couple of places we did NOT visit. First, while I thought about traveling to the Dingle Peninsula in the remote southwest of the country, my wife (who spent two summers in Ireland in college) persuaded me not to. While Dingle has a uniquely rugged beauty, she said, the experience would likely be tainted by my inability to resist asking locals where I could find the “native berries” I’d heard so much about.

Mom and I also skipped Blarney Castle, where visitors pay $15 to wait in long lines for hours to kiss the famed Blarney Stone, an experience that purportedly endows the kisser with “the gift of gab.” For one thing I had heard reports that after tourists depart for the evening, locals revel in getting drunk and using the Blarney Stone as a public urinal. Plus, all false modesty aside, I already do just fine in the cleverness department, thank you very much (see the above comment re: “berry” picking on the Dingle Peninsula).

Benvenuti a Ireland!

The highlight of the trip was the Irish people themselves – at least when we encountered any. It turns out that thanks to eased travel restrictions within the European Union, Ireland has seen an influx of non-natives filling practically every job in the country’s service sector. Mom and I enjoyed chatting with cab drivers, servers and store clerks from France, Croatia. Ghana, Brazil and elsewhere. And the two young women working at the tourist office across the street from Trinity College in Dublin were very helpful – to the extent we could understand them through their thick Italian accents, that is.

But the actual Irish people we spoke to were universally friendly and welcoming, with the possible exception of the occasional irritated motorist. As I often do when I travel abroad, I taught myself a few expressions in the native language to slip into conversations with locals at appropriate times (yes, Irish – aka Gaelic – is a completely separate language that’s taught in all Irish public schools). For this trip I worked on “Gore-uh-MAH-uh-goot,” which is my butchered phonetic pronunciation of “Thank you” in Irish.

Upon completing a store transaction in my decidedly American accented English, I would drop a casual “Gore-uh-MAH-uh-goot” on the unsuspecting clerk. The response was almost always a look of pleasant surprise, sometimes followed by “Ta falcha rote,” the Irish term for “You’re welcome.”

My smug sense of self-satisfaction at these interactions was only slightly diminished by my mother’s inevitable follow-up, when she would all but shout at the clerk, “He’s been practicing that all week!”

Ay, There’s the Pub

Perhaps my most memorable interaction took place one evening in a Galway pub. I had ventured out on my own to let mom rest after a long day of white-knuckle driving through the narrow roads of the Burren in County Clare, getting our insurance money’s worth one sideswiped stone wall and jumped curb at a time. 

Drink in hand, I took a seat at an empty table to relax and enjoy some of the authentic live Irish music Galway is famous for. Before long a gentleman who appeared to be in his mid-70s approached and, over the music, asked to join me. During breaks in the music my new tablemate, Sean and I got to know each other a bit. 

When I explained that I was from the U.S. and traveling through Ireland with my mother, he credited me with being a good son. His own beloved, saintly mother had passed four years earlier, he said, and not a day goes by that he doesn’t still grieve the loss. “My poor ma,” he added, “what I wouldn’t give to be able to see her again, even for just one day.” Reiterating what a good son I was for traveling with my mother, he sighed and silently peered wistfully into his glass of Guinness. What a fun evening this was turning out to be!

I wasn’t sure what to do if he started to cry – maybe offer to accompany him on a visit to his mother’s gravesite? But thankfully he soon perked up and we returned to chatting. He asked where in the States I was from. I told him I grew up in Boston, to which he nodded knowingly and said he could tell from my accent, which was remarkably perceptive of him since I don’t have anything approaching a Boston accent. I told him I could tell from his accent that he was from Ireland, and we both had a good laugh.

And then he leaned over and gave me a noogie.