Day 18 – Dublin, Ireland – Saturday, September 15, 2012

I'm baaaaack!

I write this as we are docking in Reykjavik, day 21, so I'm a few days behind, but happy to say that we are both doing well... now! Your prayers for a quick end to my cold worked, but then Karen got bronchitis, I got a cough, and I also was mildly seasick yesterday as we had extremely rough passage to Iceland. Consequently, we have had four visits to the medical department. Hopefully we have seen the last of them, although Karen will be on antibiotics for 7 days.

I had briefly described our trip to Loch Lomond in Scotland and the brief description is enough, so on to our next port of call, Dublin. We decided to explore Dublin on our own and bought a ticket on the HOHO (hop-on, hop-off) bus.

Our first stop was at Dublin Castle, the seat of English rule in Ireland for 700 years. It was built originally near a pool of black water, which in Gaelic is Dubh Linn, hence the name of the city. One of the pictures you will see eventually (if you come back after I have added pictures to the blog) is that of the statue of justice above the gate – minus the blindfold and admiring her sword – hardly the image of justice, eh? As Dubliners say (with apologies for minor bad language), “There she stands, with her face to the palace and her arse to the nation.”

Next stop was St. Patrick's Cathedral, which I would have assumed to be Catholic, but to my surprise it is the “Church of Ireland,” i.e. Anglican! I wanted to see this church primarily because this is where Handel's Messiah had its premiere performance as a benefit for the poor. It was well received in Ireland, but was ignored in London for about 10 years thereafter. The cathedral is also of interest because its dean for 32 years in the 18^th century was Jonathan Swift, author of “Gulliver's Travels,” intended at the time as political satire. The church was built in the 13^th century on the site where St. Patrick first baptized local pagan converts.

We had lunch at the Temple Bar, a famous nightclub in the best party district of Dublin. I didn't have a Guiness due to still suffering at the time from my cold. We didn't party much.

Because of time limitations I decided to skip the tour of the Guiness Storehouse, probably the most popular tourist attraction in Dublin. I wanted to get to Kilmainham Gaol (jail) which was highly recommended by my Rick Steves travel book. Glad we did, although I almost passed it up when I saw a long line to get in, but then decided if there is a long line, it must be worthwhile. After a 20 minute wait to get to the gate, I was told that they only accept cash (euros) of which I had none. But they were very nice, telling me there was an ATM just around the corner, and they would hold our place in line for the next tour, which they did.

The excellent docent for our tour gave us a very informative and inspired talk about the jail and its prominent place in the Irish struggle for independence from the British. It was opened in 1796 as a debtors' prison and was supposed to be a model facility, but very quickly became a terrible house of punishment for political prisoners, leaders of rebellions throughout the 19^th century, leading up to the Easter Rising in 1916. A major rebellion took place that year because the leaders felt that England would be too busy with WWI to deal with an uprising in Ireland. However, the rebellion was not successful and 14 of the 16 leaders were summarily executed in Kilmainham Gaol. The result of these executions by the British general without trial, was a major shift in sentiment by the Irish people from a preference for Home Rule within the British Empire to a strong desire for complete independence. Had this not happened, Ireland today might have a status like Scotland, which does have home rule. I learned more about Ireland's history in this hour than I had in my previous 72 years! There is a lot more to the story than I presented here, but you didn't sign up to read a book, so I'll move on.

Sweet Molly Malone and a tourist

By the time we exited the gaol, our time in Dublin was growing short and I wanted to make sure we had enough time on Grafton Street for Karen to take my picture with my arm around Sweet Molly Malone, so we took a taxi rather than waiting for the HOHO bus. And there she was, my Molly, or the “tart with the cart” as the locals call her. After a walk down Grafton Street and a stop for a latte at a coffee house, it was back to the ship.

The short time precluded so much I would have like to have seen, including Trinity College with the famous Book of Kells, a beautifully illustrated book of the four gospels preserved from the 8^th century on calfskin vellum! They turn one page per day for display.

One reason, as mentioned before, I don't particularly like cruises is that the time in ports is so short, it's like taking one sip of the finest wine, but then being told that's all you can have. But the one sip was indeed grand. On to Belfast and more history lessons of the Emerald Isle (from on board the Emerald Princess).

Jim