“No Trump Talk,” reads the sign in Dick Mack’s, a pub in Dingle, County Kerry. The ink marks are slashed and deep, as if the writer were furious with indignation. Despite the sign, one night an American starts to say something about his president, but is immediately shut down by the locals.
I sip my pint of Guinness, and contrast this visit to the one I made in 2011, which coincided with a different president’s trip to Dublin and Moneygall. “Your man Obama,” the Irish said to me in the same pub, eager to talk.
William Faulkner once famously said that in the American south, the past isn’t dead; it’s not even the past. The same can be said of Ireland, where daily reminders of colonialism, oppression, and famine stand beside the motorways, looking picturesque if you ignore the blood that soaks the ground.
In Killarney, the man who rented us a couple of bicycles told us to go see Muckross Abbey. He described how forces acting under Oliver Cromwell’s orders had sacked the Abbey and murdered the friars in 1654. He furiously pointed out that you can still see a statue of Cromwell in London, and said that it should be knocked down, just as we in America are taking down confederate statues. He tallies the numbers of Irish killed, enslaved, and forcibly removed during Cromwell’s time. The numbers (more than half a million out of a total population of a million and a half) are as fresh to him as the shaving cut on his cheek.
On the drive from Killarney back to Corca Dhuibhne—the Dingle peninsula—we pass a newish housing development surrounded by a chain-link fence. The houses show us blank, windowless stares, and grass grows thickly in the streets of the development and on the incomplete roofs. This is one of the housing schemes begun with great optimism and more than a little greed during the Celtic Tiger that ended up empty in the ensuing crash. The houses visually echo the stone walls and chimneys farther out on the peninsula that have stood tenantless since the famines of the 1840s.
Once while walking my dog in Huntington Park, I met a woman whose family is from Dingle, and I have shopped at the SuperValu and the sporting goods shop bearing her family’s name. The name carved in stone over another building is the same as one of my son’s preschool friends. A stone and brick tower stands at the mouth of Dingle Harbor; it was built in the 1840s for no reason other than to provide some work and income for the starving population. The tower, Hussey’s Folly, bears my wife’s last name. One peninsula south, the port of embarkation for those wishing to visit Skellig Michael (famous even before Star Wars came to town) is Portmagee, probably founded by some distant relative of mine. Everywhere I look I see evidence of the connections between Ireland and America, connections as solid as the stone cliffs facing the sea. Like the cliffs near Dún Beag, however, those connections feel like they are crumbling as the waves of intolerance wash ashore.
When Trump made his comments about immigrants from certain countries last week, the Irish I met (who know a bit about immigration to the US) were outraged and hurt. They know the desperation that drives people to leave their homeland — the hunger, the pain of persecution, the poverty — and they know what it is like to have their country dismissed as a hole filled with the criminal and shiftless.
On this side of the Atlantic, it is very easy for us to forget why we are here, and to close up the drawbridge after us.
Rick Magee, a Bethel resident, is an English professor. Contact him at r.m.magee.writer@gmail.com.