Ireland is the beckoning hand of welcome and the wagging finger asking ‘why did you bother?’ all at the same time.
IRELAND
has always just ceased to exist. The Ireland you are seeing or being shown is just a pale imitation of what went before, of what existed before you took the trouble to arrive at last: before time and innumerable other troubles wore it down and took it away, before the main characters in the local area passed away and left it bereft, before you turned up too late to experience the real thing, before you came to witness this present Ireland which bears little resemblance to the Ireland you came for. The music might be wonderful all right, but nothing to what it was in the seventies; the people can be lovely but spoiled now with petty materialism. The beauties of the west are now besmirched by ‘Wild Atlantic Way’ signs obscuring the very wild things you came to see.
Ireland always holds itself to high standards; but all of those standards have ceased to exist in the present and therefore, thanks be to God, cannot be met: Ireland is the beckoning hand of welcome and the wagging finger asking ‘why did you bother?’ all at the same time. Ireland exists in the timeless and the untrammeled, but by the time you arrived at Shannon, the timeless itself suddenly seemed to have been made unavailable in a very untimely fashion.
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