At the Edge of Ireland by David Yeadon

His book generated the full spectrum of reactions from horror to hurrahs when it was first published, but as I came to realize that every resident here has his or her own take on the nation’s history, such discordant reactions were obviously to be expected.
    A slightly less contentious nonfiction book by Uris is Ireland: A Terrible Beauty, completed with photographs by his wife, Jill Uris, in 1975, and I use his words to summarize the traumatic fate of this tiny nation:
    Over eight hundred years of occupation and four hundred years of intense colonization, Ireland has been cruelly and stupidly administered and her people shamefully persecuted, with every sort of indignity brought to bear. The most wanton penal laws legislated by a civilized western nation (Britain) denied the Irish Catholics every human and material right. In the mid-Nineteenth Century the Great Famine was little more than a subtle, or not so subtle, exercise at “gentlemen’s genocide.” The land had been stripped naked through court intrigues and run red to the sound of clanging armor and bellowing cannon in an epic of boundless bloody greed…This stricken land, a ponderous religion, and a tortured foreign occupation have made it impossible for decades of Irish to exist in their own country…Yet it has become a depository of the folkways of a dozen cultures, the haven of the last great peasantry of the west. All this, mixed in with their own Celtic bizarreness and the deeply practiced mystical aspects of Catholicism, has given them the universal image of “leprechaun people”…They are as warm and lovely as any on earth. Their wit is incomparable. Their use of words and language has enriched life wherever they may have touched it…Through it all a magnificent people have survived with their own identity intact!
    I couldn’t say it better myself.
    So I didn’t…except to add a celebratory postscript on Ireland’s recent economic and social good fortune after joining the EU in 1972 (previously the EEC—European Economic Community). Once the penurious basket case of Europe, the “Celtic Tiger” has led the whole community for years in booming economic expansion, international business investment, reverse emigration (Irish workers returning home), and “best place to live” appeal. As the popular saying has it—“There are only two kinds of people on this earth—the Irish and those who wish they were”!
    The only problem is that when tiny, dilapidated row houses in Dublin sell for well over a million dollars, both groups are finding it harder and harder to afford even the most modest accommodations in the major cities. Nevertheless the momentum of ambition, accretion, and affluence moves this proud nation forward, and you can almost hear the little green leprechauns giggling with delight as they watch all the gold rolling in and the coffers filling and swap tales of the Irish buying up fancy apartments in Manhattan and second homes all along the Mediterranean coast.
    Even back in the peasant-poor Middle Ages, poets like Edmund Spenser celebrated Ireland’s enduring charms: “Ah to be sure it is yet a most bewtifull and sweete country as any is under Heaven.”
    And today—in celebrating the “Celtic Tiger”—it’s a hearty Sláinte! again, a booming Céad Míle Faílte (“A Hundred Thousand Welcomes”), and this popular blessing too:
    Health and long life to you
    Land without rent to you
    A child every year to you
    And if you can’t get to Heaven
    May you at least die in Ireland

4
The Ring of Beara
    Our First “Loop” Adventure
    THE PERCEPTIONS OF “BLOW-INS”
    D ESPITE ALL THE “C ELTIC T IGER” TALES of progress and prosperity and Ireland’s pulsating aura of newfound confidence (some even claim it’s becoming cloyingly complacent at times—others claim “the bubble has to burst