May 12 - Faith and Begorrah, we’re in Ireland today

The days are starting to run together and I confess I’m getting tired with a port every day.  It isn’t too bad if the daily ports are Caribbean islands, but I’ve never been to any of these and I have a compulsion to see as much as I can. Today we are tendering into Greencastle, County Donegal, Ulster, Republic of Ireland. In other words I have set foot in Ireland; before I’d only been to Northern Ireland.

Greencastle is a little fishing village and it didn’t look like it had much to see. I booked a tour to take me to Londonderry and a place called Oakfield Park which has gardens that you see via a small train. It isn’t raining but it is cloudy and actually not cold.  In fact on the bus we were hot because the heat worked and couldn’t be turned off.

The Irish countryside is lush and beautiful.  We passed in and out of Northern Ireland which is part of the UK. Until the Good Friday Agreements were signed in April, 1998, there would have been border controls and checkpoints.  Now there’s just a difference in pavement and lines painted on the roads.  The area we passed through had nice looking homes and looked like it was reasonably prosperous as we drove along.

Our first stop was Derry, the second largest city in Northern Ireland.  Officially its name is Londonderry, but Irish Republicans and Catholics call it Derry.  Our guide Moira was Irish and though she didn’t say it, I’m willing to bet she’s Catholic.  I’ll say more about that later.  Derry is on the banks of the River Foyle and I wouldn’t describe it as particularly pretty.  Here I did see depressed looking areas.  It looks like a city which endured a lot during the “Troubles” between Catholics and Protestants for many years.

This and the next are of the Guild Hall. It looks like a cathedral to me.

We stopped for a photo opportunity at a square on one side of which was the old Guild Hall which looked like a cathedral.  It’s where trade guilds would meet in the past.  Now it’s where the Derry Council members meet.  I’m not sure I understand exactly what Moira said, but I believe there was a dispute of some kind among the various political parties operating in the city and one party walked out. The consequence is that there is currently no governing body. As she put it, where there is no structure, chaos and evil will fill the vacuum.  I had read that there had been two bombings in Derry in the last 6 weeks and she confirmed that was true.

This was the wall along one side of the square. In the picture below you can see the guns still in place there.

This was some of the nicer looking housing we saw in Derry.

We didn’t stay long in Derry and reboarded the bus and headed to Oakfield Park where we boarded a little steam train and rode very quickly around the gardens. What I saw were mostly woods. Not much had started blooming and the train didn’t slow down as we went past some picturesque stone bridges and lakes.  They were gone lickety-split before you could even focus a camera.  The gardens are owned by some “absentee” Sir and Lady something and they are trying to restore them to their Georgian splendor.

Our train that barreled down the tracks.

This and below were two places I tried to get pictures with limited success as we raced along.

As we drove back to Greencastle we drove along Lough (Loch) Foyle.  Close to the shoreline there were lots of mussel farms and traps of some kind which I'm guessing were to catch lobster or langoustines.  Interestingly, much of the seafood from here and Scotland gets shipped to France, Italy and Spain and can't be found here.

Traps to catch something

The shore from my veranda.  You can see it's pretty country but I think it's still very complicated in all respects.

Now about what I did find interesting about the tour.  As I said I’m practically positive that Moira is an Irish Republican Catholic.  She told us a lot about the treatment of Ireland for the hundreds of years the English owned the whole island.  She talked in length about the “starvation” in the 1840’s which most of us know as the Potato Famine. It resulted in the death of many Irish people and spurred the great migration to the US.  According to her, the event was not just a failure of the potato crops for five years, but also an engineered famine by the English to starve the Irish.  She said that other crops and livestock were forcibly exported so there was no food at all.  What she described sounded a lot like what Stalin did in the 1930’s to the Ukraine when millions there starved.  

Moira went on to describe the strife that went on in Northern Ireland until the Peace agreement in 1998.  I don’t know enough about the events that occurred to assess what she said and I would really like to hear the events as told by an Irish Protestant.  I know that terrible things happened but I felt as though I was hearing everything from only one perspective and I know that usually there are horrible things done by both sides of a dispute. She was fascinating to listen to and as a result I plan to read more about what went on in Ireland to try and have a better understanding of its history.  So for that reason I think the tour was worth doing.  I talked to some other passengers who were on the other bus that did the tour and their guide didn’t talk much so they thought the tour was a total waste.  Anytime I learn something or am prompted to read more about some place or time, then I think it’s worth the experience. I wouldn't book a cruise specifically because it stopped in Greencastle.  Enough said.