Ireland – Page 7 – For the fainthearted . . .

Cures

‘The strange world of Irish folk cures, herbal remedies and faith healers’, is the headline on the RTE website

The reporter notes, ‘many used folk cures alongside the conventional medical treatments of the day for the treatment of the most common and non-serious ailments.’ Indeed they did, and sometimes the most unexpected of people went to a person who was reputed to have a ‘cure’ for a complaint.

A friend recalls growing up in a stern Ulster home in the 1950s, a no-nonsense place where rational and the scientific thought …

Loyalist hopelessness

In a Loylalist area of Newtownards in Co Down, two men hijacked a Tesco delivery van. After a series of collisions en route, their progress was brought to a halt in a Loyalist area of east Belfast when the police used a ‘stinger,’ (a chain with spikes lain across the road) to puncture all four wheels.

It was an act as much of stupidity as criminality, but Newtownards was the town that in the 1980s had graffiti in a Loyalist area declaring, ‘Don’t march, mobize.’

Loyalist communities have become the …

Protestant evangelical nonsense

The exchequer surplus of €5 billion up to the end of July. The fall of unemployment to 4.2%, the lowest figure for more than twenty years. The favourable statistics would have confounded the man’s absurd arguments, not that he would have listened, not that he ever listened.

It was in the summer of 2010 that I first met him. Stepping out the front door of where he lived, I had turned and commented that the weather was bad; especially bad for the time of year.

‘It’s because of badness,’ he …

Views of Ireland

The passage of years brings an increasing cynicism about human nature, particularly about those who would set themselves as moral guardians above others.

It being the 175th anniversary of ‘Black ’47.’ the worst year of the Irish famine. I bought a copy of Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine Plot.

Insofar as any politician emerges with any degree of credibility, it is the Tory Robert Peel who saw how free trade could bring benefits, but also understood the need for the state to intervene where the market failed.

A surprise …

At Lughnasa

1st August, Lughnasa. Memories of Brian Friel’s evocations of the Ireland he had known.

The Ireland Friel described was an Ireland devoid of wealth; an Ireland often trapped in its own company; an Ireland of flawed and frail and fragile characters; but there seemed, somehow, an extraordinary resilience of spirit; a capacity for happiness rooted in nothing more than imagining what might be.

Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa can be a deeply play depressing, the few moments of light relief not dispelling the gathering gloom, yet it concludes with magical …

Dance hall days

Sitting back in the computer chair, I stared at the monitor.

The Google Maps satellite view was of the borderlands of Tipperary and Offaly, to the west lay Clare, to the north-west lay Galway. Touching the mouse, I moved northward, trying to find a place that I had passed on 29th July 2011. I remember the date because it had been the occasion of a friend’s civil partnership,

The spot I sought couldn’t have been in Westmeath, we hadn’t crossed the Shannon. Maybe it had been somewhere on the borders …