Spring Break, Part the Fourth

Tuesday, March 18 – Dingle, County Kerry

The surfers are up early.  We take a quick breakfast — instant coffee and Oatbix — and then hit the road.  Reports say the surf is good off the Maharees, so we point the car in that direction.  But between us and the waves lie the Brandon Mountains.  It’s not a terribly menacing range, at least not in the age of GPS and rear differentials, but there’s something about it that subtly domineers.  The lack of chintzy McMansions which would undoubtedly and unashamedly ravage such real estate back home is utterly refreshing and the gentle southern slope makes one wax poetically about all the grandfatherly wisdom this mountain must contain.

Myself and Rónán at the crest of Conor Pass.

The Conor Pass takes us over the mountain, and the view from the crest is best summarized in stale words like phenomenal, breathtaking and incredible.  It’s amazing how elevation piques the senses.  The road that cuts across the northern slope offers a bit of an existential experience:  one lane shared by two directions of traffic, with the massive drop on one side offering a certain, gravity-induced demise.  I took this footage on the way back; have a look:

While Ro and the guys surfed, I sat on the beach with Sarah and talked.  She spoke about the Ireland of then and now, of the have-not and the have.  It was only 20 years ago that Ireland was economically out of step with Western European standards.  She remembers how it was when she was a child.  Money was tight for everyone.  Big families crammed into small apartments.  Then Ireland joined the EU, the foreign investment came, and the country assumed an enviable sort of prosperity.  But she’s afraid it might not last, that the past is the future, that people are resting a bit to comfortably on their laurels.  Empires fall — history tells us that much — and the weak get overrun.  Yet, somehow, Ireland has remained somewhere in between.  Untouched by the Romans and untamable to the British, this people persists, and in this we find comfort.