Another slice of real Irish life

At 3pm on Sunday I walked through the doorway of the Kildare Club. The club is located in one of the august brick Georgians that line St. Stephen's Green, the huge public park in the center of Dublin. Outside, the panoply of an Irish summer weekend was in full force. Horse-drawn carriages lined the curb just in front of the massive European tour buses that are in scale only when they travel on the broadest city streets. A juggler worked the crowd in the plaza across from the park entrance. Shoppers with bags from Zara and H&M filed into Insomnia for a shot of caffeine and a sandwich.

Inside the club I was greeted by my host, Anthony Malcolmson, the archivist who did the original indexes for both the Ballinderry and Ballindoolin archives. Anthony was in Dublin for a brief stay between a trip to Limerick and his home in Belfast, and had phoned me to ask if I would like to meet with him. I left my own shopping bag with the doorman (not for security reasons, but because it wouldn't look seemly to carry it into the club; evidently shopping smacks a bit too much of real life in these halls) and followed Anthony up to the drawing room, a high-ceilinged and plastered space that looked like a slightly dingier version of how Hollywood would picture a gentlemen's club c. 1940.

After our tea was delivered on a silver tray by the concierge we talked a bit of business about the archive (talking business is also forbidden within the club's walls, along with, inexplicably, the carrying of umbrellas). But as it turned out, Anthony loved nothing more than a good gossip, and I was happy to oblige. We chatted about the more reprobate members of the Tyrrell family (my maternal relatives, and the subject of my research), and Anthony gave me some canny insights into some of the contemporary characters I have come across (being careful to except any close relative; he knows when to be discreet). After an hour of so, Anthony and I headed to the most hallowed of the club rooms, the library. With a large Members Only sign on the door (which happily for me Anthony ignored) the room is straight out of Agatha Christie, complete with a member buried in his Irish Times--I hope not literally, but with the oversize paper held up in front of his body who could tell?-- in a wing chair in the far corner of the room.

Here we met Anthony's partner Bruce. After picking up my shopping bag from the concierge, we all headed over to St. Patrick's Cathedral, considered the main edifice of the Church of Ireland; Anthony had invited me to book launch for a new history of the cathedral, evidently many years in the writing, that his own publisher, Four Courts Press, was hosting. As we walked through one of the more nondescript areas of central Dublin, Bruce told me about his various feats of academic prowess as an economic historian, listing the places he had lectured (Yale, Harvard, many locations in Europe and Asia). When we arrived at the cathedral, the narrow street that ran alongside the church was lined with more of the gargantuan white tour buses, all with two wheels propped precariously on the sidewalk to allow traffic to squeeze past. Eastern European tourists were pouring into the church after waiting outside during the Evensong service, which had just ended. Our destination was not the cathedral itself, but a small door in the wall across from it. We walked through it onto what must have normally been a hushed space protected from the noise and dirt of Dublin traffic, not to mention the curious, by a high garden wall overhung with vines and roses. The private lawn was now filled with scattered clusters of people chatting, wine glasses in hand, their pale faces occasionally looking skyward in an anxious search for what looked like impending rain. Small boys with the cherubic faces that signify boy's choir membership passed sandwiches on little trays. A miracle! Anthony had transported us to a 1970s British garden party here in the dense center of Dublin.

Here was another side of this country, one that had largely escaped me despite my attendance in church one Sunday. As I have been struggling with a way to understand what my ancestors' lives had looked like, living in a small landowner's house in the Irish Midlands, I realized that this is the part I hadn't pictured, the gentility of it, the need to grasp onto the Anglicized part of their lives so easily subsumed in a country that is so washed with Catholicism that the main national news station pauses three times a day to ring the Angelus. This hidden garden, which we entered like Alice going through a keyhole, seemed an apt metaphor for the space the Protestants inhabit here, grand but furtive, its occupants proud, separate, with the full awareness of the complex history of their families.

I stayed for about an hour in this time warp, listening to conversations, meeting Anthony's friends, and eating strawberries and cream, the de rigeur sweet this time of year. As people drifted away I asked Anthony when the actual launch would take place. Ah, he said, evidently the Dean of St Patrick's had some difficulty with one of the authors of the book, so a decision was made to forego any speeches. The fact that there were also no copies of the book itself in evidence was never explained, although one mother and son duo proudly held up their copy when I asked if they could take a photo.

As the three of us walked back, Anthony and Bruce to their club and me to the car park, Bruce explained why he would never again travel to America. He refused to be finger-printed or otherwise physically marked in some way for his passport. He was repulsed by a country that would elect a George Bush, and while he recognized that in electing Barack Obama the country was making the ultimate visible apology for its horrific gaffe, he remained skeptical. Finally, as a Northern Ireland native he continued to be furious at the fact that the main funding for IRA activities over the past 25 years came from Americans who refused, in his mind, to recognize that the IRA was a terrorist organization. Divisions run deep under the generally friendly facade on this very small island.