It’s been a quiet number of days in Dublin. Kind of lazy, in conception if not practice. By which I mean, the couple days I spent in London felt like it was scheduled within an inch of its life¹ while this has been much more flexible, deciding what to do the day before or even the day of.

I’ve been traveling with a friend, and we’ve hit a few places — a walking tour down O’Connell Street, afternoon tea at The Shelbourne Hotel,² dinner at l’Ecrivain,³ visits to the Temple Bar and a couple museums — but overall it’s been more spur-of-the-moment. It has been nice.

It’s also been an opportunity to get a bit more of a sense of the history of the city. I’ve been here twice before, once on a school trip (where our itinerary was dictated by our British minders, who may or may not have intentionally avoided addressing some of the history) and once at the tail end of a weekend driving around Ireland where I was exhausted, it was Sunday, and I had 8 hours before my flight left. So I’ve been a bit fuzzy on the details.

But it’s unmissable if you’re paying the least bit of attention. There’s the Georgian architecture from its time as the second most important city in the British Empire, the General Post Office which served as the headquarters for the leaders of the Easter Uprising,⁴ the Spire which stands where Nelson’s Column used to be,⁵ and St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral⁶ located discreetly off the main street from when it was somewhat dangerous to be a Roman Catholic in Ireland. The history of Ireland is written across Dublin.

It’s still strange for me to think of Ireland as a colony;⁷ were it not for Northern Ireland and its constant reminder of that set of thorny political problems⁸ I think it would be strange for most people. People are funny like that. We’re nearly 100 years on from the establishment of the Irish Free State, so the number of people who were alive during that or the Irish Civil War is now vanishingly small. The horrors of the past recede remarkably quickly.⁹ We rarely remember the details.

The Irish are, of course, inextricably bound up in the history of the United States. Based on surnames, it’s been estimated that about 40% of the Revolutionary Army was Irish. But the real spur was the massive immigration in the middle of the 1800s; from 1820 to 1860 almost 2,000,000 immigrants arrived from Ireland to the United States. The earliest were looking for economic opportunities or escaping religious repression,¹⁰ but with the outbreak in 1845 of the humanitarian¹¹ disaster which was the Great Famine that accelerated incredibly.

The result was appreciably similar to the current hysteria regarding immigration. There were anti-Catholic riots in the streets, and nativists¹² rode to power in a number of states. Of course, despite the most dire of predictions the Irish did assimilate.¹³ How and why this happened is long and complicated, and not always to anybody’s credit.¹⁴ But it happened and, given the 33 million Americans who claim Irish ancestry, I always want to check the lineage of anyone in the United States railing against the cleanliness or violent tendencies of anyone currently trying to immigrate to the country.

In my perambulations, I’ve traveled through capitals and former war zones; erstwhile colonies and current tourist destinations; small, sleepy villages and metropolises bursting with investment. Dublin’s kind of all of it at once. It can sometimes feel remarkably parochial, or fussy — that afternoon tea was utterly ridiculous¹⁵ — but that hotel stands directly across from St. Stephen’s Green, and there’s a Fusiliers’ Arch there which honors those who died in the Boer War. It was built in 1907, and remains one of the few colonial monuments which hasn’t been destroyed. The locals (whose sympathies were decidedly not with the British) dubbed it “Traitor’s Gate.”

That strikes me as something fundamentally Irish. While walking down the main drag in Dublin on Saturday, we passed a small demonstration in support of Palestinian rights and addressing the refugee crisis, directly outside the General Post Office. You’d hope — I’d hope, at least — that the history of Ireland has impressed some understanding of institutional oppression, of the many ways one group of people can subjugate another.

Our walk ended at the Garden of Remembrance. Another protest was gathering on the street¹⁶ but the park was surprisingly peaceful, all the same. The Garden of Remembrance was where Queen Elizabeth II, in the first visit by a reigning British monarch to the Republic of Ireland, laid a wreath in honor of all those who died for Irish freedom. The pool is inlaid with a mosaic of swords and spears, representing the Celtic tradition of breaking their weapons and throwing them into lakes or rivers to symbolize the end of hostilities. I’d like to think the Irish will remember that, as well.

Next: Hamburg to Berlin
Prev: London (LGW) to Dublin (DUB)

Footnotes

¹ Flying in on Tuesday and flying out on Thursday will do that, if you make evening plans both nights.

² One of the curiosities of Dublin is that it’s tiny compared to other places (even Boston is larger, which is generally my reference for cities-whose-reputations-vastly-exceed-their-population) so there’s about a 50/50 shot that any famous thing in Irish history happened within a stone’s throw of wherever you happen to be standing.

Among other things, The Shelbourne is mentioned in Ulysses, and the Irish Constitution was drafted there, in room 112.

³ L’Ecrivain was excellent, but in that kind of universal way. It could have been equally excellent in New York or London or Paris. I’m not trying to slight it here, but (compared to The Wilderness, where I ate several months ago, or even Oriole before I left the United States) there’s a certain placelessness to the food.

⁴ And still bears the bullet marks on the columns outside

⁵ Destroyed in 1966 by the IRA

⁶ The “pro” stands for “provisional.” A “Pro-cathedral” is a temporary, acting cathedral which, given St Mary’s dedication in 1825, might seem a bit incongruous. But the Catholic Church designated Christchurch as the official cathedral in Dublin, and hasn’t yanked the status even though it was handed over to the Church of Ireland as part of Henry VIII’s schism.

⁷ There’s some debate over this, which seems to rely on the precise definition of “colony.” You can argue vast swaths of Ireland beyond the Pale were never actually colonized, or that large portions were more properly “vassal states” or some such. There’s little doubt that Dublin was run as a colony of the United Kingdom, though, and in much of the rest the distinction is pretty minor.

⁸ The fear that Brexit is going to obliterate the Good Friday Agreement certainly becomes a lot more visceral when you’ve been strolling past the sites of past bombings.

⁹ Although long-forgotten resentments can resurface just as quickly, given a spark. Or a demagoguing populist.

¹⁰ You’ll note that these are often intertwined, making current refugee law (with its distinction between the two) somewhat schizophrenic.

¹¹ Charles Trevelyan, who oversaw the relief effort, was of the opinion that “the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson” and behaved accordingly. Ireland exported food every year during the famine, as the British government believed that laissez-faire capitalism would solve the problem. Spoiler: it actually made things much, much worse.

¹² Including the aptly named “Know-Nothings”

¹³ Compare present-day complaints about the Puerto Rican Day parade in New York City, which is all about how drunk they get, versus the complaints about the St. Patrick’s Day parade, which is now about how drunk everybody gets.

¹⁴ The newly arrived Irish often found themselves working alongside blacks, in very similar jobs; for a number of them the path to respectability involved crowding out the blacks and then enforcing a monopoly on the work.

This wasn’t universal, mind you. Daniel O’Connell (namesake of the O’Connell Street mentioned above) wrote “Over the broad Atlantic I pour forth my voice, saying, come out of such a land, you Irishmen; or, if you remain, and dare countenance the system of slavery that is supported there, we will recognize you as Irishmen no longer.”

¹⁵ Not that I’m complaining. The world could stand more ridiculousness.

¹⁶ This one agitating for affordable housing for the lower classes and the homeless