Our visit to the Republic of Ireland was a part of the same trip as Scotland and England, but because the experience was so different, I decided it needed a separate entry.  I had been to Ireland during my year at the University of Manchester.  As it was a weekend trip, my traveling companion and I visited only Dublin and the village Howth.  It was not a great trip.  I chalked it up to not having planned the trip well.  We chose to go on Easter Weekend, when most things were closed, including the Guinness Brewery.  I always wanted to give Ireland another chance.

A stop in Ireland was not originally intended to be part of this trip, but when the situation worked out such that I could afford a few extra days away from work and my daughter expressed an interested in visiting the Emerald Isle, I made the necessary adjustments to add it to our itinerary.

I went to Ireland expecting to love it, hoping to love it, wanting to love it.  My daughter and I had watched Tomm Moore’s movies Song of the Sea, Secret of Kells, and Wolfwalkers obsessively when she was younger.  While not an Irish music fanatic, I was familiar with Irish songs such as the Rocky Road to Dublin, Wild Rover, and Curragh of Kildare.  Even the name of this blog was inspired by an Irish song.  Like many Americans, I claim partial Irish ancestry.

Our flight from Manchester to Dublin was delayed around 6 hours due to a mechanical issue with the plane, so we arrived in Dublin a bit irritable as it was.  Dublin was the last stop on a trip just over two weeks in length, and we were missing our home and pets by that point.  Maybe I repeated a mistake from my original trip of spending too much time in Dublin and not seeing enough of the rest of Ireland.  But I did not love it.  Many people I have shared this with upon my return are aghast at this admission. But these easily offended individuals all had one thing in common…none of them have been to Ireland.  

The Irish aren’t as friendly as you might expect.  When I got back to the USA I compared notes with several people I knew who had also been, and many said much the the same thing.  They can be a good bit friendlier when you are sitting around the pub having the pint, but I barely drink, and don’t generally travel for nightlife or to sit in pubs, and especially not when traveling with my daughter.  The friendliest, most charming person we interacted with during our stay in Ireland was our guide for a Dublin food tour (which was excellent).  And he was Scottish, though he had lived in Ireland for years.  But for the most part, I thought the Parisians I had interacted with years before when I visited that city were warmer and more welcoming.  A border control agent I had to deal with on the way out of Dublin will go down in my personal history as the rudest a-hole I ever had the displeasure of dealing with while traveling. 

Dublin isn’t that scenic.  The Book of Kells was worthwhile.   St. Patrick’s Cathedral is lovely from the outside, though we did not go in.  After Scotland and Wales, we had seen enough castles, so we skipped Dublin Castle, but little really stood out as memorable to me.  The Irish countryside or at least what we saw of it running between Dublin, the Cliffs of Moher, and Galway was lovely, but not more lovely than the English, Welsh, and Scottish countryside.

Our Irish tour guides seemed to have agreed on a standard set of acceptable talking points, which include:

1. The Vikings were mean to us.
2. The English were mean to us, and sometimes they still are.
3. If your potato crop fails, Ireland is a really lousy place to be, and it is best to just pick up and leave. 
4. Guinness.

The last is problematic because any Irishman’s mention of Guinness is likely to be followed by a discussion of all the steps necessary to ensure that you get an enjoyable pint of Guinness.  

1. You must drink it in Dublin as it does not travel well.
2. You should be sitting as close to the tap as possible, because apparently even the act of carrying a pint across the pub can disturb the layers of sediment in that pint. 
3. The head should have no more than 1 or 2 bubbles in it, and ideally zero.  Any more than that is just cause to reject the pint and ask for another. 
4.  You must wait exactly 1 minute 59 seconds before beginning to drink the pint so that it has time to settle.
5. It must not be had at the Temple Bar, as they aren’t Irish and they will overcharge you.

I think this is all a sort of ruse to distract unsuspecting tourists from the fact that Guinness is a fairly awful tasting drink and the only way to get a pint of Guinness you can enjoy is to have had enough pints of Guinness before it that you are so blind drunk you can’t tell how it tastes at all.

The one drink of Irish whiskey I had sampled was about the same as the least unpleasant of the Scottish whiskey’s I tried.  No better, no worse. For all the difference I could tell the two could have been poured from the same barrel.

So anyway…St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Pretty sure one of these non-descript buildings was James Joyce’s house.  If you don’t know who James Joyce is, he is considered one of the greatest novelists in English ever. 

And the Cliffs of Moher.

The big winners out of this trip are the Maltese, as I will no longer be citing Malta as the country I least want to return to.  I am still going to love Tomm Moore’s movies.  And I am still going to turn it up just a little when The Dubliners come on the radio.  I would like to say if we spent more time here we would have liked it more, but I will not come here again.  The only thing I am sad about leaving behind in Ireland is Irish coffee, because it is a wonderful drink and I am sure I will never find a place that can make a decent one at home.

And yes I know Irish coffee has both Guinness and Irish whiskey in it.  Hush.