Things That Happen: Irish Trip 2022 - That Did Happen

Ireland was an experience for me three years on. Everything changed for me from my last visit. And, yet, in some ways nothing changed at all.

My good friend, Irish musician John Buckley McQuaid, reminded me during my trip home to Ireland of a Joycean quote – to paraphrase – you have to leave to be able to stay.

And that is how I felt over the past two weeks in Ireland – a native, and yet an exile by choice.

I can’t speak for others. I’m a Dubliner, so that’s my spot – my original home. Others from rural parts of Ireland may have a different opinion and experience living abroad for years.

More than ten years in the Netherlands and three years away without a visit home due to the pandemic; I’m never sure where the beginning and ending are of the journey.

But sometimes, that’s the way journeys are – without clear beginnings and endings. Nothing is ever fixed and finite. We just move and time passes.

I’m two Fridays in Ireland and the Late, Late Show is forgotten about. We’re too busy in the kitchen catching up in love and reflection. In the Netherlands, I’d be on the RTE Player of a Friday wondering which interview guests this lanky, socially awkward fecker, as host, is wasting my time with this week.

But, Christ! The cost of very basic shopping was crazy. Don’t even get me started on the cost of drink and cigarettes.

This time, I wasn’t in Ireland for the cost of living, the social reform, nor the current and local talk of the town.

Once you leave Ireland and set your roots elsewhere, you rarely return… at least not for good.

‘’Are yez back for good says a neighbour.’’

‘’No, just a holiday visit,’’ says I.

‘’When are ye commin’ back again?’’

‘’Not till next year, probably,’’ says I.

‘’Y’ll miss the place.’’

I smile and nod. My lips don’t move. My head and heart pounds - I will. But for different reasons than the place.’’

Even my Dutch friends sometimes ask the same questions.

I understand it from both perspectives.

I still feel after ten years away from Ireland that a visit is like stepping into the past with the people I grew up with – but that they still live in. Whereas, I don’t. If that makes sense.

While that past can be a comfort, at times, I’m somehow removed from it. It’s an uncomfortable truth that comes with the positives and negatives.

I’m in Ireland three days. The pocket of my jeans becomes increasingly heavier with coins from the use of cash. I don’t really use cash much in the Netherlands and the experience reminds me of less than sober nights in my 20s, dumping change on the kitchen counter or bedroom locker after a night out and slumping into bed. And I’m thinking: what is this obsession with cash and weight – like a show of fine jewellery, land and wealth to be smelt, felt and seen?

I coped with the lack of Wifi on our visit, but like electricity, I’ve grown used to it being there without expectation, no matter where I am or travel to in the world. In previous visits, we’d get on a bus or pop into a McDonald’s just to be thankful of using the free Wifi!

Ireland was both a comfort and an experience of the two worlds I now live in – or at least my head still lives in.

I drove. I walked. I like to walk when I can and the destination is not too far. You never know who you will meet.

Doing the crossword in the Herald newspaper each night with mam, like the old days. Going for a walk and chatting to people in a way I wouldn’t do in the Netherlands – two worlds colliding again.

Walking the same stairs my late father walked when he was bold and refused to use the electric stair seat mam installed for him. Running my hand along the cold, black steel runner and knowing my dad tread these steps just three years ago. Sleeping in the same small front, upstairs room, where I rattled the wooden frames of a cot up until two years of age at six in the morning.

Looking out on the street I grew up on through a small window. The distant sound of children playing, dogs barking and the sound of an ice cream van. But they are all now in my head. Memories. Nothing has changed… and, yet, all has changed.

And then to the stillness of night. It reminded me of my home in the Netherlands. Quiet, and very much like Walkinstown – an area that developed from the 1920s-50s and Zaandam also has an extraordinary history.

My Dutch remains poor. I still struggle to assimilate in our neighbourhood. And, yet, even with perfect Dutch, I think I’d still struggle and things wouldn’t be much different. I’ve become far too reliant on my wife to ease that assimilation. But I’m grateful that the Netherlands is a far easier country to live in and enjoy than other countries as an English speaker.

Mam struggled to find dad’s gave plot in Palmerstown cemetery. It was the first time she’d been there since he passed away in January 2021. I felt guilty.

In the very late 1970s and early 1980s, dad and I would roll into Palmerstown in the truck for the milk round about 6 am. Doorstep deliveries on a Saturday and Sunday because I was at school during the week. A beautiful and quite place then and we would pass the cemetery gates on the Kennelsfort Road, long before the major housing developments. The place has changed a lot since then.

I’ve always believed, in those years, this was when dad decided it was the place he wanted to finally rest. He later bought two family plots next to each other, knowing his own parents’ time would come soon.

We’d admire the stars in the morning, before sunrise, the clink of bottles and the squeak of gates that needed oil. I hated the cobwebs in bushy gardens because you got a face full of them down the path. Many a glass bottle dropped. The sound of the glass smashing on a concrete path in the still morning air. Biting you. ''Ah, fuck it. Poxy spiders!''

Cleaning up the shards of glass in the dim light.

''Dad!''

''What? ... Ah, Jaysus. Watch your hands on that broken glass. Use the crate if it's more than six bottles.''

Dad could carry ten bottles, four in each hand, and two tucked under his arms. Even by then, my hands were more deft with the pen and words.

One Saturday morning, we hit Palmerstown, mid-summer. It was already bright, about 6.30 am, the sun ablaze. I remember looking across through the gates of Palmerstown cemetery and as a 10-year-old was puzzled with the sight of a young couple fornicating in the distance!

‘’What are they doing, dad?’’

‘’Burglars,’’ says he, briefly covers me eyes from the birds and bees and instructs, ‘’Come on, 4-5-1-2, next four houses.’’

To this day, I can still remember the sequence of numbers, six houses at a time in a block.

For five hours each morning, we’d speak in milkman language of just numbers and code. Loading up at Kimmage dairy - ''87 crates, 12 brick cartons, 1 crate of slimline, 8 bottles of buttermilk, two boxes of butter, and a tray of 24 cream.'' The doorstep sequence - ‘’4 bottles (+cream), 5, 1 (+buttermilk), 2 (+butter). ‘’Grab the bottles and move.’’

Me dad watched the fornicating couple for a minute or so and only uttered one phase after that, I’ll never forget it: ‘’Ah, Jaysus, at this hour!’’

Even when I drove my mam and wife to Palmerstown cemetery, I’ll never be able to get that image out of my head. Somewhere, some kid might be part of my history!

So, we’re in Palmerstown cemetery trying to find dad’s grave and all the time I’m thinking; I hope this grave isn’t feckin’ on the spot where that couple did it. Poor mam is in a fluster and the cemetery is closing in a half hour.

We are like three pigeons walking up and down highstreets looking for a clue or scrap of food. We find every Rooney grave other than dad’s grave. Finally, we find it, where he always planned to be. Right next to his own mam and dad.

We have our moments as a family.

‘’Do you want a few moments to say hello to your dad,’’ says mam.

‘’No. I talk to him every single day.’’

Like death, truth is also painful – what we would like to do and what we can do. We wish, we dream. There is nothing more than my wife and I would like to do than retire to Ireland with an idyllic cottage, a few sheepies, a few chickens, several cats, but that’s not in our heads or hands now. It’s not in the foreseeable future, much as we would like to.

It's the same reality every Irish person faces living abroad and settled. It’s not an option and I don’t see it being one for many over the next 10 years.

So when I’m asked; ‘’Will you ever come home?’’ it’s not for me to decide that. That’s something inherently Irish people need to understand and address and stop pretending they live in an idyllic place, while still moaning about it at same time, and yet claiming it’s fabulous; and sure, ye wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.

We do. Several million of us as Irish citizens!