Slán Anois: Leaving Ireland Easter Tuesday

I don’t know how people blog every day! It takes me too much time to process what I’m seeing and hearing and feeling. I’m backdating things today (again) to write a few thoughts about Easter Tuesday (March 29), our last day in Ireland. Brad and I were in line in the morning with the first members of the public to see the new exhibition about the Rising at the General Post Office (GPO), which was the rebels’ headquarters. If you are in Dublin and have any interest at all in the history, I can’t recommend the exhibit more highly (although, to me, it too takes even-handedness a few steps too far—if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor).

What an amazing mix of social issues and personalities involved at the time. To name a few:

Padraig Pearse, a poet, teacher, and barrister, one of the leaders of the Rising.

Labor leaders and labor unrest (including the big lockout of 1913) a critical part of the Rising.

A piper was also one of the leaders—we recently went to a concert of the Seattle branch of Cumann na bPíobairí, the Irish Pipers Association, that Eamonn Ceannt founded in 1900.

And, of course, women’s rights and the military involvement of so many women in the Rising (see Easter Monday post for a little more about Constance Markievicz).

At the end of the tour, we walked back to the barracks and picked up our bags. Saying goodbye to cold, windy Dublin ... 

we hailed a cab to Malahide Castle, north of town and near the airport, to have lunch with cousin, Mary, and cousin, Siobhan, who was flying home to London that afternoon with her children. I asked our driver, who turned out to be Nigerian, what he thought of the Rising commemorations. He said he had mixed feelings—proud they had stood up to the British Empire (Nigeria had been a colony as well, of course) but sorry about the bloodshed. This just got him started though and, for the rest of the drive, we heard about how he thought those who insisted on independence for Nigeria were nevertheless misguided because the British would have governed better (sigh …), how African-Americans were just lazy and playing the victim, and what a great guy Trump was because he would mix things up and that is what America needed! Wow!! After lunch, we said farewell to Ireland and hopped a Ryanair jet to Rome ….