The PC: Euro ’85, Part 20 … War stories, from neutral Ireland to Omaha Beach.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 20 … War stories, from neutral Ireland to Omaha Beach.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

(Twentieth in a series chronicling my travel year 1985)

The “craic” in Sligo had been excellent, but European time was running out.

(For the uninitiated, the Gaelic word “craic” means the quality of conviviality, discourse and entertainment on hand – often, though by no means exclusively, as applicable to pub culture.)

I’d covered a ridiculous amount of ground up to this point – Luxembourg through Italy and Greece to Istanbul, then back through Italy, Austria, Germany and France to Ireland. It’s what you do when you’re young, and you think it might be your only chance.

It’s what you do when the Eurailpass keeps paying for trains, and occasionally boats.

For the remaining three weeks I’d be pushing myself ever greater distances in order to touch a few scattered Scandinavian urban high points prior to the single most anticipated weekend of the trip: August 1 – 4 in Leningrad, USSR.

But first things first. There’d be a train ride back to Rosslare, a ferry boat to France, and a pilgrimage to the D-Day beaches in Normandy.

I wanted to pay my respects.

As noted throughout this narrative, World War II was a constant presence during my childhood, and it remained quite the active memory for people of my father’s age, whether they were living in Georgetown, Indiana or Gessopalena, Italy.

My dad, a Marine Corps veteran of the Pacific Theater, was only 60 years old in 1985 (he died in 2001). Newsman Tom Brokaw had yet to coin the phrase “Greatest Generation,” but during the 1980s, the ubiquity of Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” certainly set the stage for later celebrations of American patriotism with regard to remembrances of the war, and the generation that fought it.

Even then, I knew this was overly simplistic, and yet it exercised a strong hold. My dad didn’t like talking about “his” war, and probably sublimated these experiences into a fascination with the Nazis, Soviets and "their" war. He never made it to Europe, and regretted it. I took seriously my responsibility to provide reports to the home front.

Ironically, after a week spent in Ireland, there seemed to have been very little in Dublin or Sligo to suggest a war had ever been fought at all, and in fact, that’s because it had not – at least insofar as “official” Irish history regarded it.

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'Twas in the year of 'thirty-nine when the sky was full of lead, when Hitler was heading for Poland, and Paddy for Holyhead

Holyhead is the Welsh ferry port directly across the Irish Sea from Dublin. “Paddy” is longstanding slang for an Irishman, and the song refers to the curious fact that with nary an interruption, the Irish diaspora originally prompted by the 19th-century potato famine continued, according to its traditionally sad cadence, throughout the horrendous international conflict officially known within the fledgling Irish Republic not as a “war,” but as the “emergency.”

These semantics point to the anomaly that the Republic of Ireland, minus its Ulster flashpoint (then as now tied to the Brits), maintained a strict neutrality throughout World War II. The resulting situation was surreal at best, and for some, it symbolized a typically Irish response to calamity.

Now forgotten by Americans, the controversies engendered were extreme matters of life and death, especially for Britain during the Blitz. Irish independence was new, untested and in all respects a work in progress, and ties with the mother country still were painfully palpable.

I've worked till the sweat it has had me beat
With Russian, Czech, and Pole
On shuttering jams up in the hydro-dams
Or underneath the Thames in a hole
I've grafted hard and I've got my cards
And many a ganger's fist across my ears
If you pride your life don't join, by Christ!
With McAlpine's fusiliers

The song is called “McAlpine's Fusiliers,” written by Dominic Behan, multi-talented brother of the more boisterous and notorious writer Brendan. The lyrics, arguably Dominic’s most famous, considers the experience of migrant Irish laborers in Britain during the war.

The chief unintended consequence of neutrality’s chosen isolation was the near complete collapse of an already weak economy, as vast numbers of male citizens migrated to an active belligerent (Britain), either by choice or circumstance, and became de facto combatants through war-related work or military service.

Back in Ireland, diplomatic representatives of all warring nations were posted to Dublin in close proximity, Irish newspapers were censored to achieve fairness and balance for all warring nations, and life became even tougher for the long suffering rural poor, who were enlisted into make-work schemes like a bizarre program calling for escalating quotas of peat to be cut (it was customarily burned for fuel).

All the while, Ireland’s hotels and resorts remained packed, catering to a wealthy British clientele traveling to an otherwise impoverished country to eat and drink extravagantly, avoiding the inconvenience of dinnertime bombing at a time when rationing and austerity were norms back home.

Meanwhile, Catholic priests railed against the depravity of Europe, holding out a mystical vision of an autonomous, corporatist Ireland, one making good on the model of Salazar in neutral Portugal. The church feared the immoral contagion of condom-carrying American GI’s temporarily billeted in Northern Ireland prior to the climactic Normandy invasion.

Rigorous censorship was damaging to Ireland's writers and artists, who were cut off from previously fecund streams of continental inspiration.

Even stranger, Ireland even had its own hardscrabble fascist cadres, although comparisons with the Marx Brothers in "Duck Soup" are more appropriate than the actual dimensions of the threat posed to civil order by these confused and disorganized elements.

When the war was over, the questions arose: Had Ireland's leader, Eamon de Valera, heroically preserved its shaky independence by adhering to neutrality, or had his hedging retarded the country's standing in the post-war community of nations?

Were the Irish being traitorous to their acquired Anglo heritage by embracing neutrality, or were they as yet crafty Gaels, taking the only truly sane position in an utterly insane world?

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The return path was familiar, from Sligo to Dublin by rail, a change of trains to Rosslare, and from the sleepy port overnight by boat to France.

Looking back, I’m continually fascinated by how very little I remember. There was a full Sunday in Sligo to recover from Saturday’s Live Aid concert-watching in the pubs. What did I do? What did I eat and drink? The memory is lost.

Much of Monday was taken up in transit. What was I thinking? It’s a blur, or more accurately, a blank, although Guinness may have been involved.

There is a faint recollection of boarding the ferry and putting my name on the waiting list for a room. Perhaps I’d grown fond of beds rather than floors. My name was called, and fortunately, the Irish Continental Line took plastic, though the debit card came another $25 closer to evaporating.

The return ferry debarked at Cherbourg instead of Le Havre, and I stepped onto French soil on Tuesday, July 16, 1985. From Cherbourg, it’s an hour by rail to the town of Bayeux, which is mildly famous for a tapestry depicting the Norman conquest of England in 1066, and boasts a beautiful cathedral called Notre-Dame de Bayeux.

Bayeux lies a few miles south of the English Channel coast, and the beaches chosen by the Allies for the D-Day landing. The beaches face northward, toward England.

For the invasion, from west to east, they were given the names Utah and Omaha (American troops) and Gold, Juno and Sword (British, Canadian, Commonwealth and Free French). The nearby towns of Sainte-Mère-Église and Caen were heavily damaged during the fighting, but Bayeux largely spared.

During the short train ride, I talked with a sharply outfitted American backpacker from Los Angeles, who said he was 50-something years old and had only recently quit his job in the film industry (or perhaps it had quit him), cleaned out his savings account and booked a flight to Europe.

We both got off the train at Bayeux. He was planning on staying at a hotel most backpackers couldn’t afford, and I was looking for a much cheaper hostel called the Family Home.

The woman at the Family Home said there was no available space – unless maybe there was, so could I wait?

At least she spoke English. After earnest consultations with co-workers and negotiations with another tourist who’d entered the building at the same time as me, it became clear that a room formerly dubbed as a dorm for four persons was being filled with mattresses, and henceforth would house six. We were the lucky two.

Unfortunately, no one told the original quartet, who came back from their grocery foraging expedition just after the newcomers had claimed their mattresses. The most vocally annoyed was Fred, a garrulous Floridian. However, a Canadian named Bruce quietly calmed Fred, and an adult conversation ensued.

The following morning, we hopped a bus together to Omaha Beach, the six of us, and another round of temporary friendships began.

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Previously:

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 19 … Sligo, Knocknarea, Guinness and Freddie.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 18 … Irish history with a musical chaser.

The PC: Euro '85, Part 17 ... A first glimpse of Ireland.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 16 … Lizard King in the City of Light.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 15 … The traveler at 55, and a strange interlude.

The PC: We pause Euro '85 to remember the Mathäser Bierstadt in Munich.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 14 … Beers and breakfast in Munich.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 13 … Tears of overdue joy at Salzburg's Augustiner.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 12 … Stefan Zweig and his world of yesterday.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 11: My Franz Ferdinand obsession takes root.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 10: Habsburgs, history and sausages in Vienna.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 9 … Milan, Venice and a farewell to Northern Italy.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 8 … Pecetto idyll, with a Parisian chaser.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 7 … An eventful detour to Pecetto.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 6 … When in Rome, critical mass.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 5 … From Istanbul to Rome, with Greece in between.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 4 … With Hassan in Pithion.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 3 … Growing up in Greece.

The PC: Euro '85, Part 2 ... Hitting the ground crawling in Luxembourg.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 1 … Where it all began.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 18 … Irish history with a musical chaser.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 18 … Irish history with a musical chaser.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

(Eighteenth in a series chronicling my travel year 1985)

As I sit at my desk in the year 2015, writing this account of travel in far-off 1985, roughly 4,000 compact discs surround me, arranged in shelving units of varying sizes and shapes. I’m told they’re obsolete, but then again, so were the LPs packed into my tiny bedroom back when Ronnie Raygun was President, and I was planning my first trip to Europe.

Nowadays vinyl once again is sought-after, although not cassette tapes, which also took up storage space in the cramped living quarters of my youth. At least I never bought into the ethos of the 8-track tape, a fact of which I’m inordinately proud.

At the age of 55, I’ve yet to learn how to play a musical instrument, and if I so much as tried to carry a tune across the street, the likeliest result would be two broken legs – or the wailing enmity of every dog in the neighborhood. Still, my earliest childhood memories are about music, and it is impossible to overstate the role music continues to play in my everyday world.

During the years prior to the summer of 1985, my musical consciousness was filled with the usual markers of a male in his early twenties, with rock, pop and MTV the dominant influences. Perhaps unusually, my parents had raised me on swing and jazz, and these were viable complements. Just after college, formal composition began to please me, and I was a regular listener of WUOL, the University of Louisville’s classical FM station.

As genres go, “world music” wasn’t on heavy rotation in metropolitan Louisville at the time, and this is where Don Barry’s tutelage re-enters the narrative.

My cousin always brought albums of Irish music with him whenever he’d drive back from Florida to visit his mother (my aunt). I’d copy these albums onto cassettes: The Dubliners, Wolfe Tones, Tommy Makem, Clancy Brothers and other Irish folk bands, mostly from original pressings Don had purchased during his previous journeys to Ireland.

Of course, music wasn’t the only cultural touchstone in my informal education about all things Irish. As a pedagogue in the finest of constructive senses, Don provided ample homework, with reading assignments that extended far past our summer interludes: James Joyce ("Ulysses" is one thing; "Finnegan's Wake" quite another), Seamus Heaney, John Synge, W.B. Yeats, and "The Green Flag," Robert Kee's masterful history of Ireland.

Irish music helped tell Irish history, and it all became interwoven. Don and I listened to bawdy tunes, weepy ballads and riotous calls to action. We also drank gallons of beer while doing so, and these were the best seminars ever.

My family background is almost entirely sharecropper German from the Pomeranian plains, with a smidgen of English tossed into the mix, but once I'd experienced Irish culture from these secondary sources, it always seemed there must have been at least one stray shot of Irish DNA somewhere -- a rogue, a wanderer, an outcast from the great Irish displacement, who’d contributed to the family tree and then disappeared into the mists.

Musically, Ireland felt very comfortable to me, even if discomfort was the source of so many of the more overtly political songs, given that in terms of history, Ireland hasn’t always been such a happy or peaceful place.

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By 600 AD, the island’s original Celtic inhabitants had been converted to Catholicism. During the Dark Ages, Viking and Norman incursions were disruptive, but the visitors generally assimilated. A far more portentous invasion began in the 16th century, as launched by the bigger island to the east.

In 1534, King Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church, and established his own Church of England. In 1541, he added the Irish throne to his list of royal titles, and thus commenced more than 150 years of “plantation,” a policy wherein Protestants (primarily from England and Scotland) were settled in Ireland and afforded rights disproportionate to those of the indigenous Catholics, who steadily were disenfranchised.

The area of heaviest Protestant settlement was Ulster, a cluster of six counties to the north. Today, this is Northern Ireland, which remains joined to the United Kingdom. Ireland’s other 26 counties were subject to the same Protestant favoritism, but retained Catholic majorities. These make up the contemporary Republic of Ireland.

In the early 1800s, sectarian strife grew amid the institutionalized disparities, with seemingly endless patterns of revolt and subjugation, culminating with a wild card blithely tossed by Mother Nature: A potato blight in the late 1840s, which deprived huge numbers of impoverished Irish Catholics of their sole source of sustenance.

The tragic ensuing famine either killed or caused to emigrate more than 2,000,000 people, or one of four Irish men and women, and yet throughout the crisis, farms controlled by outsiders (most of them English) continued to export food, even though people nearby were starving.

Not for the last time, London’s inept performance during the famine reignited a slow, smoldering movement for greater Irish autonomy. Through the remainder of the 1800s, this movement for “Home Rule” grew stronger, but because of its Catholic orientation, Protestant-dominated Ulster threatened counter-measures of its own to remain under British sway, and little changed.

Just before the outbreak of WWI, it seemed as though Home Rule might at last come to pass, but the conflict intervened. It was broadly agreed that domestic considerations would be placed on hold for the duration. Spotting an opportunity to force the issue while the British were preoccupied with the war, radical Irish nationalists struck.

On April 24, 1916 (Easter Monday), rebels seized key buildings and installations of importance in Dublin, including the post office, and declared a free Ireland. It was called the Easter Rising; however, the Irish nation did not “rise up” as the rebels expected, and the revolt was mercilessly crushed by British troops.

Yet again, London completely misread the situation, responding with calculated harshness toward a populace that for the most part had not heeded the revolutionary call. All but a handful of the rebels were executed, and the brutality managed finally to turn Irish public opinion against British rule, at least among Catholics outside Ulster. The stage was set for ugliness, which dutifully followed.

From 1916 through 1923, the contemporary configuration of Ireland was determined through a series of parliamentary maneuvers accompanied first by a triumphant war of independence against the British, and then a divisive civil war among the Irish themselves. By the early 1920s, the exhausted island was divided, and a template of periodic violence established for the ensuing decades.

It has been almost a century since the Easter Rising, and just about everything else in Ireland has changed save for the division of the island into two entities. In theory only, “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland ended with a brokered settlement in 1998. Meanwhile, the Irish Republic has weathered a burst real estate bubble following its “Celtic Tiger” period of modernization, and a new chapter is being written as you read these previous ones.

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My major point with respect to this upheaval-laden travel narrative is that when I first stepped onto Irish soil in 1985, quite a few of the elderly men and women seen reposing on park benches in Dublin had active memories of the tumultuous 20th century.

They had lived through the infancy of the Free Irish State, and at the time, as I prepared to board the train from Dublin to Sligo and a planned 5-day jaunt in the countryside, emigration remained the norm almost 150 years after the famine. Their country still was reckoned among the poorer relations of the European Union.

Perhaps their experiences, and those of their kinfolk abroad, explain the powerful longing for home that surfaces in so many of the classic Irish folk songs, as in my favorite, “Carrickfergus,” as performed by my favorite group, the Dubliners, with vocals by Jim McCann. Printed lyrics can't convey the melancholy of this incredible traditional song, but nonetheless, here are excerpted stanzas.

I wish I was in Carrickfergus
Only for nights in Ballygran
I would swim over the deepest ocean
Only for nights in Ballygran
But the sea is wide and I can not swim over
And neither have I the wings to fly
I wish I had a handsome boatman
To ferry me over, my love and I

My childhood days bring back sad reflections
Of happy times we spent so long ago
My boyhood friends and my own relations
Have all passed on like the melting snow
And I spent my days in ceaseless roving
Soft is the grass and my bed is free
Oh to be back now in Carrickfergus
On that long winding road down to the sea

Now in Kilkenny it is recorded
On marble stones there as black as ink
With gold and silver I would support her
But I'll sing no more now till I get a drink
'Cause I'm drunk today and I'm seldom sober
A handsome rover from town to town
Ah but I'm sick now, my days are numbered
Come all you young men and lay me down

Note that Carrickfergus is in Northern Ireland. In terms of the Irish diaspora, it isn’t at all clear whether this fact is ironic.

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Previously:

The PC: Euro '85, Part 17 ... A first glimpse of Ireland.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 16 … Lizard King in the City of Light.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 15 … The traveler at 55, and a strange interlude.

The PC: We pause Euro '85 to remember the Mathäser Bierstadt in Munich.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 14 … Beers and breakfast in Munich.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 13 … Tears of overdue joy at Salzburg's Augustiner.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 12 … Stefan Zweig and his world of yesterday.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 11: My Franz Ferdinand obsession takes root.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 10: Habsburgs, history and sausages in Vienna.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 9 … Milan, Venice and a farewell to Northern Italy.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 8 … Pecetto idyll, with a Parisian chaser.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 7 … An eventful detour to Pecetto.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 6 … When in Rome, critical mass.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 5 … From Istanbul to Rome, with Greece in between.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 4 … With Hassan in Pithion.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 3 … Growing up in Greece.

The PC: Euro '85, Part 2 ... Hitting the ground crawling in Luxembourg.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 1 … Where it all began.

The PC: Euro '85, Part 17 ... A first glimpse of Ireland.

The PC: Euro '85, Part 17 ... A first glimpse of Ireland.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

(Seventeenth in a series chronicling my travel year 1985)

In the summer of 1985, I was resting dockside in Le Havre, thinking about the meaning of life and craving draft Guinness, which I’d seldom had the chance to enjoy. This was about to change.

One night, long before this moment, in a drunken stupor of semi-religious ecstasy, my cousin Don had uttered an astute prophecy, foretelling of delicious and creamy Guinness pints, as served by impeccable barmen on the wonderful ships carrying budget travelers from France to Ireland.

Actually, we both were in our cups, and it was less of a bold vision than a recapitulation of his own previous travel experience. I was suitably enamored, and incorporated a line item for the inevitable splurge.

At 24, I was a beer neophyte, and Guinness was anything but ubiquitous in Louisville and Southern Indiana. The draft version was almost unheard of locally, and mythical in proportion to its rarity.

Then one of my pals returned home from college touting the bottled variety of Ireland’s national beverage, and seeing as Guinness Extra Stout could be found at better area package stores, it was a start. Even if this firmer recipe lacked the raw mystique of the elusive draft, it was a transformative introduction.

The heavily roasted flavor of Guinness Extra Stout was a bit much at first, so we began by mixing it “half and half” with any and all cheap lagers, from Red, White and Blue on up to Harp (somehow Irish-on-Irish seemed to make more conceptual sense). As time passed, I began weaning myself from the lager “filler,” and learned to drink the nectar straight.

Still, veteran travelers and the guidebooks agreed: Draft Guinness was best, and it never got any better than in Ireland. Why? Because it was fresh and unpasteurized, with a whole national culture revolving around it, uniting all classes in philosophy and knowledge over pints in classic pubs renowned as universities for poor men?

Perhaps. It also might have been the relative absence of draft Guinness closer to home, where we might have been able to compare, and soon become jaded by proximity.

As I am now, 30 years later.

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As expected, my reticent shadow from the Le Havre train station walk was contemplating many of the same directional strategies. We converged at the ferry office, and exchanged pleasantries. It transpired that his name was Paul, from somewhere in New York. Paul had graduated from college and broken up with a girlfriend, and now he was using “Let’s Go: Europe” in order to find himself before returning stateside for graduate school.

For the next three days, we became bosom pals, and I’ve not seen him since. That’s just how it worked. Electronic networking had yet to be invented, and you took life on the road as it came, exchanging postal addresses and phone numbers, and then mostly forgetting about them.

Mine were recorded in a little blue (not black) book. It would be nice to go through it now, trying to associate names and details long submerged, except it was cruelly lost somewhere in Vienna in 1987.

As for the Irish ferry itself, the 1985 model of 1st Class Eurailpass came with three valuable seaborne options, with free deck passage on routes between Italy and Greece (I did it); Sweden and Finland (still ahead); and France and Ireland.

The Eurailpass was good for passage on the boat, offering nothing more than an overnight nesting place on the exposed upper deck, or in various out-of-the-way nooks inside. Either way, the night would be spent on the floor, and the importance of those pints of Guinness loomed even more critically.

There was a baggage check for storing my increasingly battered gym bag, and the quick dispatch of leftover bread and nibbles from Paris. The maritime Shamrock Bar didn’t open until the ship was a few miles out from the shore, in international waters. When the signal was given, we approached the bar and had the first of several pints.

They were better than I expected, and later, the floor wasn’t bad. I found a carpeted area to crash. Irish life looked to be okay, after all.

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Coming into Rosslare Harbor late the following morning, the weather was spectacular. Paul lived near the ocean, but I was a Midwestern landlubber, albeit thankfully one without any propensity to sea sickness. I found something joyous and primeval about coming into harbor on a ship, producing a feeling of landfall that trumps planes routinely landing and rail cars coming to rest by their platforms. I enjoyed it immensely.

Walking from the ship, a scrubby, stubby bluff could be seen rising just behind the terminal buildings. Atop it was a billboard depicting pint glasses of Guinness, all in a line: “Welcome to Ireland.” It felt like patriotism.

At the time, the Rosslare port struck me as small and underdeveloped, and noteworthy primarily for the rail line to Dublin, where both of us had resolved to begin. Between my visits to Ireland in 1987 and 1989, Rosslare Harbor was dramatically upgraded, with a sleek ferry terminal built, and to be known henceforth as the Rosslare Europort.

Several hours later, Paul and I alighted in Dublin at Connolly Station. As we stood on the sidewalk plotting hostel strategies, we were approached by a middle-aged woman who asked us if we needed a room. The guidebooks noted the practice, and deemed it generally safe with the usual caveats, so we accepted.

It wasn’t just around the corner. We walked a bit, hopped a bus, and walked some more. All I can recall about it is that “Doreen” kept referring to my speaking voice as reminiscent of John Wayne, her greatest American hero (something about the Irish gift of gab, lady), but the arrangement was above board and a perfectly serviceable, and even included a fry-up for breakfast.

Another culinary first: Baked beans with coffee at 8:00 a.m.

Doreen’s house stood alone and unattached, though row houses were the norm in her neighborhood. She provided maps, showed us where amenities were located in the neighborhood, provided tips on public transportation and had bottles of Harp in the fridge – “just replace the ones you drink.” All the while, Irish history came spewing from her.

We’d neither slept for very long nor eaten much, and so a couple bottles of beer immeasurably enhanced the entertainment value of the lesson. It began with our gray-market innkeeper demanding to set one thing straight, immediately, using basketball as an example.

Basketball?

That’s right. Specifically, Doreen wanted to talk about the American professional basketball team located in Boston, Massachusetts, arguably the world capital of the Irish Diaspora.

“You mean the Celtics (SELL-tics),” said Paul.

Hook, meet fish: “Yes, I do, but it isn’t SELL-tics at all. It’s KELL-tics,” and so began a digression on the legacy of the Celts (properly pronounced “Kelts”), ancient tribal Europeans of the Iron Age, and ancestors of today’s Irish.

And how to remember the hard “k”? Doreen had a suggestion for this, too. Just fix an image of Bushmill’s or Jameson’s in your brain – “remember, it may be true that the Arabs invented distillation, but we Irish perfected it” – and always ask the bartender for a Belt of the Kelts … or even two.

True enough. Celtic cultures expanded into many European territories, but the advent of the Roman Empire gradually pushed them toward the continent’s western periphery, to remote islands and isolated coasts. In modern times, we think of the Celts as comprising Gaels (Irish, Scottish and Manx peoples), Welsh and Bretons.

It’s far more complicated than that, but for my purposes today, it’s enough to know that a few central elements of enjoyable living, including music, beer, conversation and food, are a stock in trade of the Celts, and that among Celts, the Irish stand out as visible and enthusiastic proponents of these virtues. Doreen was the first of many native examples, and I’m grateful for her giving nature in what otherwise was a business transaction.

Exhaustion had set in, and Paul and I had no desire to roam widely in an unfamiliar city, so we walked a couple of blocks to a diner of sorts, where I promptly devoured my first ever chicken curry. It had peas and carrots, and I didn’t know to be picky about authenticity. Replacement beers came from an off-license on the walk home.

Back at the house, I noticed Doreen had a sizeable collection of record albums. There was familiar pop music from the 1950s and 1960s, and also Irish folk music. Some of these names I recognized, because my own introduction to Irish history came through music, and as always, I had Doc Barry to thank.

---

Previously:

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 16 … Lizard King in the City of Light.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 15 … The traveler at 55, and a strange interlude.

The PC: We pause Euro '85 to remember the Mathäser Bierstadt in Munich.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 14 … Beers and breakfast in Munich.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 13 … Tears of overdue joy at Salzburg's Augustiner.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 12 … Stefan Zweig and his world of yesterday.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 11: My Franz Ferdinand obsession takes root.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 10: Habsburgs, history and sausages in Vienna.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 9 … Milan, Venice and a farewell to Northern Italy.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 8 … Pecetto idyll, with a Parisian chaser.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 7 … An eventful detour to Pecetto.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 6 … When in Rome, critical mass.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 5 … From Istanbul to Rome, with Greece in between.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 4 … With Hassan in Pithion.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 3 … Growing up in Greece.

The PC: Euro '85, Part 2 ... Hitting the ground crawling in Luxembourg.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 1 … Where it all began.

The PC: McAlpine’s Fusiliers and neutral Ireland.

(Published at LouisvilleBeer.com on March 17, 2014)

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McAlpine’s Fusiliers and neutral Ireland

It is St. Patrick’s Day, time again to endure the tasteless annual outbursts of shamrock-mounted hokum fueled by green-colored lager. The Irish among us somehow manage to tolerate it with good humor and eternal grace, even if the fact remains that a vast majority of American revelers on Amateur’s (Day and) Night Out never give a second thought to the history and culture of the island.

It’s a fascinating story. Ireland’s experience in WWII was the topic of this 2007 essay, originally blogged in 2007, now rewritten and updated.

Houndmouth, band and ale, all around this November.

In the summer of 1985, I was in Ireland.

I was in search of an Irish stereotype, preferring it to be a regular provincial town and not a larger city, once with scenery nearby for rambling through. There needed to be pubs (as though one could locate a square inch of Ireland without three or more of them) and cheap eats. It needed to be accessible by train, because that way, tickets already were paid with my Eurailpass.

A place just like Sligo, in fact.

It was to the northwest of Dublin, on Ireland’s opposite side, and a place utterly alien to me that sounded estimably Irish. There wasn’t enough time to explore Donegal, to the north, where the original language still could be heard. Sligo was my choice, and it proved to be a good one.

Exiting the train station on a sunny day, I saw an orderly settlement of perhaps 10,000 inhabitants (a quarter-century later, it has doubled in size). There were pubs and a lively main street, a small river surrounded by decaying gray mills, and green fields on the periphery, rolling out to meet Knocknarea and Ben Bulben, two limestone hills looming nearby. Near the bus station I passed a normal row house with a hand-lettered sign in the window offering a room to let for travelers just like me. The husband and wife both were teachers, supplementing their incomes during tourist season. It was ideal.

Back in France, a British rock and roll magazine parked atop the breakfast table had trumpeted Live Aid, Bob Geldof’s benefit concert for Ethiopian famine relief, scheduled for worldwide transmission by satellite on July 13, 1985. Early in the morning that exact day, Gerry was off to play golf at nearby Strandhill, and he dropped me off at the foot of Knocknarea. I hiked to the top for an examination of the ancient burial mound, then descended and hopped a weekend bus back to Sligo. Live Aid was underway at Wembley in London, and the pubs were more crowded than I'd imagined with people in the pre-big screen age, watching the concert.

At some point, I went back to my lodging, and found Gerry and Mary intently huddled around a tiny black and white television in the kitchen, upon which there were fuzzy images of U2 taking the stage. This was much to my delight. It was a band I knew well, just a few albums into its ascension, and as Irish as Irish could be. Sharing this viewpoint with my hosts, they nodded amiably and proceeded to inform me of their abysmal ignorance of pop music -- but U2, well, it was a different thing altogether, even if they didn't know a single song.

"They're Irish boys, one of us."

Fast forward too damned many years, and I feel the same sort of pride about Houndmouth. They're New Albanian lads, and a lass, although the difference between anecdote participants is that I know and like Houndmouth's music, which to the uninitiated is hard to describe. Accounts of the band often evoke comparisons to The Band, and I'll leave it at that. We all got together early in 2013 when Houndmouth suggested we brew a beer just for them, and while such pairings don't always work out, this one seemed worth trying, and so we did. It was a genuine collaboration. We sat around a table at Bank Street Brewhouse, tasted and chatted, and the final verdict was a hoppy American Wheat Ale. David Pierce and Ben Minton took it from there.

Houndmouth was on tap for Houndmouth's season-opening outdoor show at the Iroquois Amphitheater back in April, and it will be pouring again on November 29 and 30, when the group plays indoors at Headliners. NABC's web site has the details, along with news of the St. Matthews Mellow Mushroom's month long Houndmouth beer promo.

Mellow Mushroom in St. Matthews is putting on the Houndmouth all November long