See Ireland with new eyes
Bus tour helps writer rediscover country she fell for 15 years ago
IRELAND— This country calls to Canadian visitors for many reasons: its traditional music, its bucolic landscape and its dry stout. But there’s another defining characteristic of the two countries’ relationship — the movement of the Irish people.
The first record of the Irish in Canada dates back to 1536, when Cork fishermen sailed to Newfoundland. Now an estimated 14 per cent of Canadians have descended from Irish immigrants.
Ireland’s culture weaves in and out of modern Canada like one of its famous knots, making even first-time visitors feel strangely at home among the Celtic crosses and ceilis.
“We’ve all got Irish ancestors somewhere,” explains Insight Vacations tour director Michael Doughty over a cup of tea on a sunlight-soaked sidewalk in Moate, a market town west of Dublin.
“So, it’s like coming home. That homey warm feeling of the people and the country. . . . It’s hard to put that into words.”
While I don’t have Irish ancestry, this trip does indeed represent a homecoming of sorts.
When I was 22, I worked at a cattle farm in County Westmeath in exchange for room and board. After a couple of months, I hitched a ride in a beat-up Land Rover to a coastal town in County Sligo, got a job at a small pub, made fast friends and carved out a little life for myself.
Like many others who’ve experienced the engaging nature of the Irish craic and the intoxicating beauty of the landscape, leaving Ireland was hard. But after nearly 15 happy years in Canada, I’m heading back for the first time — and I couldn’t have chosen a better way to do it.
For the past week, Doughty has been expertly guiding me — and a busload of other international visitors — around spectacular spots such as Trinity College, Dingle Bay and the Ring of Kerry.
The weeklong itinerary has also taken me to places I didn’t get a chance to see when I lived here (Cliffs of Moher) and places I didn’t even know I needed to see before coming back (Lough Corrib).
Plus, the company’s 40-seat coach, with its Wi-Fi, on-board bathroom, big picture windows and extra roomy seats — not to mention its excellent driver, Eugene — is a lot more comfortable than the back seat of that muddy jeep that once took me across the country.
A tour-guide veteran of 45 years (23 with this company), Doughty acts as our personal travelling concierge, organizing our scheduled stops with military precision and setting up special off-the-beaten-tourist-path “flourishes” — such as a hurling lesson in Kilkenny or hawking at a country estate — along the way.
“I’m a travelling Swiss Army knife,” he says.
“My local knowledge is just that,” says Irish-Scot Doughty, who was born in Donegal, Ireland, but moved with his family to Glasgow, Scotland, when he was 15 because of the conflicts in Northern Ireland. “I lived in these islands, so a lot of it is because I’ve experienced it.”
But as Doughty points out, what makes Ireland so special isn’t the breathtaking scenery (and there’s a lot of it).
“It’s the Irish people themselves, their heart, their warmth, their friendliness. For me, it’s its people — that’s its real charm.”
As our tour director, standing at the front of the bus dressed in a green Harris Tweed sports coat and vest, he’s a fine ambassador, weaving facts and folklore into a narrative to help us understand the complicated history of a complex country.
“I’m a storyteller. What I learned a long time ago, I can give you the figures and histories . . . but that’s so cold, it’s like being back at school,” says Doughty. “What I like to do is talk like how my grandfather used to do to me. He’d put everything into a story . . . that way I could visualize and experience it through his eyes.”
A few days before, when we were driving through the Burren National Park, he had told us how, thousands of years ago, Celtic warriors would take a stone from their birthplace with them into battle because of their supposed magical powers.
“The stones you always carried where you go, no matter what — that stone allowed you to travel on the Long Road underground to the place of your birth . . . it’s the stone that brings you home.”
He’d instructed us to pick up pebbles of our own earlier that week without explanation. Doughty’s in- tentions became clear as we piled out of the coach at the park’s Black Head Point just south of Galway, into the blustering, misty wind, giving us time to carefully place our special stones along the Burren’s shoreline.
“You’ll now always be connected to this land. No matter where you’re from or where you go, think of these stones, and you’ll come straight back here,” promises Doughty.
And you know what — he’s right. Emma Yardley’s trip was sponsored by Tourism Ireland and Insight Vacations, which didn’t review or approve this story.