Much of the Dublin that he captured in works such as Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has fallen victim to urban renewal. In Galway and Mayo Counties, on the Connemara Peninsula, you can still find people who speak Irish as a first language, though there are only a few thousand. Nearby is Knocknarea mountain, which I climbed on a sunny day to see a cairn, about eighty feet high, that legend says is the grave of the queen of Connacht, who lived almost 2,000 years ago. Much of the countryside is surprisingly empty. In the west, on the Connemara, there is still a kind of vacuum left by the millions who starved during the Potato Famine or migrated to Canada and the United States.
Stone houses stand with roofs crumbling, looking a little like eggshells broken on stony ground.
Like Atlantic waves pulling back from the shore, chiseling the rocks, the people who went before have left their mark on the empty countryside. Copyright 1999 riverrun enterprises, inc.