Tourist in Ireland, Part One: “If Ireland was so great…”

Forty-five years ago this May, I visited Ireland for the first time. That was during a 5 month hitchhike and hostel tour of Europe during which we hit a lot of countries. In rough order of appearance, that lot was: England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Luxemburg, Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Lichtenstein, Switzerland, Yugoslavia (as it then was), Greece, Turkey, Italy, Spain.

On my return home, I said that there were three places that I was absolutely certain I would return to: Paris, Yugoslavia (as it then was), and Ireland.

I haven’t (yet) been back to Yugoslavia (as it then was), but I really would like to see Dubrovnik again. Paris? Been back a handful of times. As for Ireland, I took me until 1985 to make a return trip, but since then I’ve been to Ireland a number of times, and I’d place that number between 15 and 20. Last week’s trip was my fifth since 2011.

This one was more impromptu than the others, less planned a year in advance.

My niece and a friend were spending spring break visiting a classmate student-abroading in England, and Molly wanted to also scoot over to Galway, where she’d spent a semester last year, for a few days. So she asked me and her mother if we wanted to meet up with her in Galway. We did.

Trish and I decided to make a week out of it, and we pre-tacked on a couple of days in Dublin and a “Roots” visit to ancestral turf in Ballymascanlon, Co. Louth.

My grandmother Mary (Trainor) Rogers was famously known for saying “If Ireland was so great, we all wouldn’t have had to come over here.” Nanny, of course, had never set toe in Ireland. Her parents, Bridget and Matthew Trainor, however, had shipped out in the 1870’s, leaving like millions of others, because Ireland, in fact, wasn’t so great. So they left for Amerikay.

Bridget and Matthew were from the village of Ballymascanlon, a village on the outskirts of the town of Dundalk.

There is a high-end hotel there, the Ballymascanlon House, a fancy resort and golf course. Out there in the middle of nowhere. We decided that we didn’t want to get stuck out there in the middle of nowhere, so we stayed in a very nice B&B (as it turns out, run by a Latvian mother-daughter combo) in Dundalk, and schlepped out to Ballyma to the fancy-arse hotel for Sunday lunch. (When we walked through the door of the House, Trish noted that it was probably the first time that any member of our family had walked in through the front door.)

The countryside in that area, the Cooley Peninsula, is gorgeous territory. And the Ballymascanlon House, which was built up around one of those Anglo-Irish rich-folk manses, has beautiful grounds. And on those beautiful grounds are the stables where, I believe, young Matthew Trainor worked at one point as a stable boy

I think this is the case, but the only people who might know for sure, the last of my father’s first cousins, both died within the last couple of years. And Ellen and Ned took whatever the story is to their graves in St. Joseph’s Cemetery, nearby the graves of Matthew and Bridget (not to mention my parents and grandmother).

The stable boy story makes sense: poor kid from a large Catholic farm family in the village.

So stable boy ‘tis.

Thus, after a quite nice old-school Anglo-Irish three course lunch at Ballymascanlon House, Trish and I went out to see the stables, shown here.

We were told that the stable buildings are now used for storage. If so, Ballyma House is missing a tep. These would make really cool timeshares. Or golf condos. Or whatever.

Anyway, it was interesting and a bit moving to see where my great-grandfather had/may have worked. (On an earlier trip to Ireland, I’d visited the church (a beautifully restored 13th century Cistercian Abbey) and cemetery in Ballintubber, Co. Mayo, where another great, Margaret (Joyce) Rogers hailed from. It was similarly interesting and a bit moving to see all those Joyce headstones and know that I was related, however distantly, to everyone six-feet under them.

There was one other thing to do on the Ballymascanlon House grounds, and that was the Proleek Dolmen, an ancient portal tomb. It was a bleak. cold, windy, damp day – when we’d landed in Dublin that morning, there were near-blizzard conditions, and we’d cabbed out to Dundalk amid swirling snow squalls – and we had to trudge along ice-encrusted, muddy paths to get there, but the Proleek Dolmen was worth the trudge. (Did Matthew Trainor trudge by when he headed home after work in the stables?)

Louth is a border county, and at times we were quite near the border with Northern Ireland. Thanks to the EU, that border is now open. It’s not clear how Brexit will impact this. (One cab driver speculated that if the hard border goes back up, The Troubles between Unionists – those wanting to stay part of the UK – and Nationalists – who want the six northern counties to become part of a unified Republic of Ireland – will return. Hope not, but speaking of The Troubles, in Dundalk, we passed the local constituent office of Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin, who until recently represented the area in the Oireachtas (the lower house of the Irish Parliament).

Along the way to/from Ballymascanlon House, we saw plenty of signs for Newry, which is in Northern Ireland.

Newry factored into Nanny’s stories, as it was there that her father, Matthew Trainor, went to market to vend whatever the Trainor family grew or raised. And “the black Protestants would throw rocks at him and his wagon because he was a Catholic.” Note that “black” has nothing to do with skin color, and was just the modifier for Protestant to underscore how dreadful the Catholics found them. (Later in the week, in Galway, I had lunch with some Irish friends (my age) and mentioned the terms. Michael confirmed that this was how Protestants were frequently referred to when he was growing up.)

I’ve never been to Northern Ireland.

Probably worth a look on my next trip to Ireland. Cooley Peninsula and Derry, maybe?

When we got back to the B&B, it was pretty miserable out, and we were pretty tired, so we never got around to exploring the treasures of Dundalk. Typical provincial not-much-to-see-here town, I’m guessing. Still and all, a good place to stop on the way to trod in the steps where my long-gone great-grandfather, Matthew Trainor the stable boy, may (or may not) have trod.

On to Dublin!