3-5

3-5-14

My cousin woke me at midnight, or what they call 8:00 am here in Ireland. (The jetlag was still kicking in…) Got up, had breakfast, went back to bed. (I had been on fb messenger til 4:00 am local time. Didn't feel as if I were up all night until the local morning got here.) Awakened again at noon. Time to get it together and do something with the day!

Vern pointed me in the direction of Kilmainham Gaol – a mere two blocks away. I strolled down there, looking like someone who knew where he was going, but feeling like anything but. I know on this trip that I am the stranger, the foreigner – I know nothing, I cannot be right in these places because I am not of these places. It’s a feeling I will have to become comfortable with.

Found the historic site with no problem. Didn't look as menacing on the outside as I expected, but then, I wasn't going in for a very long stay against my will, either. There was no crowd, and I wandered in to be told there was no admission charge today. Works for me – I prefer there are no charges when I walk into a prison, even one not in use.

Entry into Kilmainham Gaol

The prison was opened in 1796, meant to be a more humane place of incarceration where some level of reformation could take place. One inmate to a cell was the plan, plus segregation between male and female inmates (not normally prison practices at the time). It reached serious overcrowding conditions by the mid 1800s during the great famine and wound up with five or six inmates to a cell designed to hold just one, segregation going out the window. Children as young as seven years old were incarcerated for such crimes as stealing food or merely begging.

Cell door

The bulk of the history seems to be focused on the Easter Uprising of 1916. The Irish declared independence, and England got a good laugh out of that, came in militarily, blew stuff up, about 500 people were killed, and the ringleaders of the rebellion were rounded up, most of them winding up in Kilmainham. Several of them were executed, including James Connolly, a man so badly wounded that he wasn't even held there but was at a hospital. When they brought him to Kilmainham to execute, they had to tie him upright in a chair so the firing squad could shoot him. (I guess no one would volunteer to hold him up. Cowards.) One of the ringleaders, the one who read out the proclamation of independence, was also married in his cell the night before his execution. There were a couple of colorful characters who were not executed, including a countess and one Eamon de Valera. Valera held a U.S. citizenship and would later be a president of Ireland.

The entire incident actually helped garner sympathy for the rebellion. That led to the Ireland split – free in the south, still under British rule in the north, as it is to this day. Some Irish rejected the split, resulting in the Irish Civil War. Around 1921 to 1923, Irish were imprisoned at Kilmainham by Irish, not English. The prison was closed for good after that, and not re-opened until the 1960s, then only as the historic attraction it is today. You've seen it in films such as the Daniel Day-Lewis pic In The Name of The Father.

After the grim tour, it seemed that I saw this pain in the faces of people I passed on the street, almost an inherent sorrow in their eyes. What is it like to have struggled for independence so recently? To have had such violence, even in more recent times? Is there a tendency to expect trouble, maybe a lingering disappointment in the split nation? I also learned that the Irish flag is symbolic – the green represents free southern Ireland, the orange represents “loyalist” northern Ireland, and the white strip in the middle is to represent peace between the two. Let's always hope.

I needed to pause for a bit, so I stopped in a pub on the way home for a beer and soup. The waitress had just enough of a stronger accent that it took me a minute to be sure I understood her before I responded. She probably thought I was slow. It will almost be easier where I don't speak the language – I’ll just be gesturing and pointing.

Everyone looks different here. Do they look Irish, or just not American? I can't be sure. It's a subtle difference. And it's not just in people. I stopped in a store on the way back, and all of the products are different, even when they're the same. For instance, there are Doritos, but not Nacho Cheese favor – here, it's “Tangy Cheese.” (Which, to an American ear, sounds like it could be referring to something you don't want to put in your mouth.) But the similarities with subtle differences? It's almost like traveling to another dimension, just one removed from our own. I'm sure the dimensional variation will increase once I get to the nations on the continent…