Sunlight on the sea, County Kerry, Ireland.

Last month I wrote about how happy we were to connect with my Fenton cousins who still make their home on the farm in County Kerry where my grandmother was raised, and how intrigued we were during a visit to the rural townland in County Mayo from which my grandfather Kane emigrated.

A link to that post is here: https://mainecrimewriters.com/2024/05/06/finding-family-in-ireland/

Of course we found the National Library , , ,

My grandparents were with us in spirit for the rest of our trip, especially in Dublin, where we made a point to visit EPIC – The Irish Emigration Museum. That’s right—Ireland lost so much of its population in the 19th and early 20th centuries that it has a museum dedicated to those who left.

An exemplar of effective multi-media storytelling, EPIC is an immersive experience about the practical and emotional aspects of the Irish diaspora.

We absorbed stories, gazed at photos, listened to music and came away with a deeper appreciation of why my grandparents and so many other Irish people in the 19th and 20th centuries responded to the siren call of America and other far-off places, yet held their homeland close in their hearts until they died.

14 Henrietta Street is a powerful social history museum in Dublin.

We also toured 14 Henrietta Street, an elegant Georgian home built in the late 1740s for one of Dublin’s most wealthy and powerful families. A century later, the Henrietta Street neighborhood had become one of Dublin’s poorest, and by the early 1900s, #14 had been transformed into a tenement where more than 100 people lived cheek-by-jowl.

Condemned in the 1970s, the building was purchased by the city in 2000 and has now been transformed into a social history museum that effectively tells the story of its (and Dublin’s) sometimes painful past.

On a different sort of inspirational front, we were wowed by MoLI, the Museum of Literature Ireland. Ireland has gifted the world with many brilliant writers, and MoLI honors them all.

Mr. Joyce, himself.

An entire room is (appropriately) given over to James Joyce but MoLI also celebrates the work of Samuel Becket, W.B. Yeats, Maeve Brennan, Edna O’Brien, Seamus Heaney, Mary Lavin and many more.

An excerpt from a letter James Joyce sent to a friend about the challenges of getting published. The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?

A particularly fun interactive exhibit homed in on a truth that’s universal and fundamental—the need to simply start writing, no matter how intimidating the goal of completing a story, a poem, or a novel may feel before your pen scratches paper.

The room where this appears on the wall is papered with cards on which museum-goers are invited to write the first words of their current or dreamed-of project.

Me writing my first line at MoLI

No trip to Ireland is complete without spending some time in local pubs, truly the social hub of most Irish communities.

John Benny Moriarty’s in Dingle

For us, traditional music is the draw, and we found plenty at pubs in Dingle, Doolin, Clifden, Galway and Dublin.

These gentlemen in Clifden both accept tips and give advice.

We missed a Sunday afternoon session at the famous Crane Bar in Galway.

But caught one the next evening at Tig Cóili.

An especially lively session on a Monday evening at Tig Cóili in Galway.

In a wonderful bit of serendipity, we met up with a Maine friend in Dublin.

Our friend Simone is in the middle, wearing a peach colored shirt.

Our pal Simone Daranyi, a talented fiddler born and raised on Peaks Island, has just completed her second year at Trinity College.

Lucky for us, she balances her engineering studies with her love for trad music, and she’s made the grade at the legendary Cobblestone, where the bartenders wear t-shirts proclaiming it to be “A Drinking Pub With a Music Problem.”

On our last night in Dublin, it was a special joy to watch and listen to Simone and a group of other traditional musicians play a lively session.  If we hadn’t already decided that we must return to Ireland as soon as possible, that night alone would have convinced us.

Brenda Buchanan brings years of experience as a journalist and a lawyer to her crime fiction. She has published three books featuring Joe Gale, a newspaper reporter who covers the crime and courts beat. She is now hard at work on new projects. FMI, go to http://brendabuchananwrites.com