"[T]he voyeuristic new 'Portal' street exhibit in the Flatiron District connecting New York City and Dublin with a 24/7 live video feed has already caused chaos..."

"... with mischief-makers on Ireland’s side flashing everything from their bare bums to swastikas and a photo of the Twin Towers in flames on 9/11.... [The] earnest utopian vision proved no match for the pub-lined Dublin thoroughfare, whose Guinness-glugging patrons were quickly drawn to the futuristic-looking exhibit like moths to a flame in videos circulating online. Within hours of the Dublin portal going live, a 'very drunk' woman in her 40s was led away by cops and arrested after 'grinding' her backside against the screen... Adam Nunan, a cruise ship audio engineer originally from Dublin and in New York while the ship is docked here, said, 'That doesn’t represent Ireland very well when you do that. That was everyone’s thoughts back home, there was a lot of people who didn’t want the portal to be built for that reason, that Americans might look at Irish people in the portal doing weird stuff....'"

From "NYC-Dublin live video art installation already bringing out the worst in people with lewd displays" (NY Post).

Earnest utopian vision? Why was this invitation to exhibitionism able to be promoted as utopian? And on what basis does the NY Post present the "utopian vision" as earnest? And why does the headline say "bringing out the worst in people" when the article is all about what's happening on the Irish end of the portal? 

I do exactly this — get up at 3 a.m. Eastern Time — and I do it from the Central Time zone.

The other upside to moving to Ireland is that I think the time zone would be good — could start working at 3AM eastern time and have a crackling hot take on the news in your inbox by 9 eastern. https://t.co/iNogjL06S0 pic.twitter.com/wCbEgnTvih

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 27, 2022

"I was raised in an Irish family baked in bitterness about British oppression. The monarchy seems like an expensive relic to me...."

"I always thought of Queen Elizabeth as an avatar of nepotism and colonialism. But as time went on, and victimhood became the fashion, I began to have a creeping admiration for her stoicism. Then, in 2011, I covered her fraught trip to Ireland, the first by a British monarch in a century. Suddenly I understood how one small movement of her head could soothe over 800 years of bloodshed and hatred. The Irish were skeptical at first, not wanting to be treated as subjects. Gerry Adams complained the visit was too soon. (Maybe wait another century.)....  How could Queen Elizabeth move past the 1979 murder by the I.R.A. of her cousin Lord Mountbatten and his 14-year-old grandson?.... And how could the Irish move past the 1972 Bloody Sunday horror, when British forces gunned down 14 innocent civilians? The queen spoke a phrase in perfect Gaelic and offered regret about how Britain had made Ireland suffer. She said both sides needed to be 'able to bow to the past but not be bound by it.'"

Writes Maureen Dowd, in "Charles in Charge" (NYT).

"Liz Pickard, an office worker from Denver, was raised Episcopalian, but discovered the story of Brigid on an earlier visit to Ireland."

"She came to Solas Bhride this year for a weeklong stay in its hermitage. 'I was searching for meaning and she gives so much meaning,' Ms. Pickard said. 'Right now, if you go down a certain road with religion, there’s a lot of pain caused by these people, but with Brigid, I think there’s a lot of kindness, and a lot of service and courage.' Two sisters, Georgina O Briain and Caragh Lawlor, sat in the calm of Solas Bhride’s central prayer space on Saint Brigid’s Day, quietly weaving rush crosses... 'Brigid was both Christian and pagan, a mix of the two, and while I’m not very religious, I am very spiritual, and she brings it together for me,' Ms. O Briain said.... Tellingly, Brigid’s Christian nuns maintained a pagan-style fire shrine on the grounds of her abbey, even after the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in the 12th century, in which the English monarchy imposed strict Roman Catholic doctrine on the independent-minded Celtic church of Brigid, Patrick and Columba — Irelands’ trio of patron saints...."

From "As Ireland’s Church Retreats, the Cult of a Female Saint Thrives/The cult of Saint Brigid, with its emphasis on nature and healing, and its shift away from the patriarchal faith of traditional Catholicism in Ireland, is attracting people from around the world" (NYT). 

I didn't know the legend: "Around the year 480... a freed slave named Brigid founded a convent under an oak in the east of Ireland. To feed her followers, she asked the King of Leinster, who ruled the area, for a grant of land. When the pagan king refused, she asked him to give her as much land as her cloak would cover. Thinking she was joking, he agreed. But when Brigid threw her cloak on the ground, it spread across 5,000 acres — creating the Curragh plains...."

Here's the Wikipedia article "Curragh." An excerpt:

There has been a permanent military presence in the curragh since 1856... Records of women, known as Wrens of the Curragh, who were paid for sex work by soldiers at the camp, go back to the 1840s.  They lived in 'nests' half-hollowed out of banks and ditches, which were covered in furze bushes....

Nowadays, the pagan-curious ex-Episcopalians traveling to commune with St. Brigid might gaze longingly at an "offbeat" Airbnb "nest" — a half-hollowed-out bank covered in furze bushes.

The walrus who fell asleep on an iceberg and floated to a place in Ireland where it was the most exciting thing that ever happened.

The guy at the top of this report about the Irish walrus 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/nYhYfGmDCt

— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) March 15, 2021

"This lack of personal involvement in the struggle did not stop Biden, when he was seeking national office, from inventing a civil rights past for himself."

"[Richard Ben Cramer, in his classic account of the 1988 presidential primaries, What It Takes,] reported on his rhetoric in the primaries in 1988: 'Joe was off on his life… how he started in the civil rights movement…remember?… The marches? Remember how that felt?… And they’re nodding in the crowd, and he’s got them, sure.' Even when his handlers warned him to stop saying this because it was not true, he couldn’t help himself: 'Folks, when I started in public life, in the civil rights movement, we marched to change attitudes.' The plain fact, as [Biden’s biographer Jules] Witcover notes, is that 'he avoided street protest or anything else that smacked of civil disobedience.' He was a concerned observer of, not a participant in, the great dramas of the 1960s. So how could Biden imagine himself as the reincarnation of the Kennedys? Those two words: Irish Catholic. His claim to that legacy is not experiential or particularly ideological. It is ethnic and religious. The Kennedys defined an Irish-American Catholic political identity—white (even in their case conspicuously privileged), yet by virtue of the grimness of Irish history and the outsider status of Catholics, supposedly not guilty of the grave crimes of racial oppression. Its promise was to act as the bridge across the great divide of US society, being mainstream enough to connect to the white majority but with a sufficient memory of past torment to connect also to the black minority. Its underlying appeal was to the very thing that Biden would come to embody—'a sense of the depth of their pain' rooted in 'vivid memories of sad times.' This is what Biden chose when he defined himself as he has throughout his public career: 'I see myself as an Irish Catholic.' And this was indeed a choice. Biden is not an Irish name.... So Biden could have presented himself, had he chosen, as an all-American boy. Instead he identified with his mother’s ethnic ancestry...."

From "The Designated Mourner" by Fintan O’Toole (in The New York Review of Books)(discussing Joe Biden's memoir, "Promise Me, Dad").

"A veteran Democratic foreign policy adviser has accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of nepotism, dishonesty and vindictiveness..."

"... in an assault on a previously untouched part of the Clinton political legacy – Ireland. Trina Vargo, who was a behind-the-scenes Washington player in Northern Ireland’s peace process, claims the couple tried to obtain a scholarship to Ireland for a boyfriend of their daughter, Chelsea, and later cut funding for the scholarship to punish Vargo for backing Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination race."

From The Guardian.

"My reluctant companion believed that conversation had to be all or nothing, either teetering on ice or plunging into the unknown waters beneath."

"She didn’t know she just had to pull on a pair of skates and twirl around for a while.... I didn’t want a vapid exchange, and in-depth conversation wouldn’t have been appropriate either, and I had no intention of launching into either. The perfect in-between connection was small talk, but we missed that connection, so I was just a woman alone on the subway...."

From "Americans Are Terrible at Small Talk/One Irish woman’s unscientific investigation" by Maeve Higgins (NYT).

ADDED: It's not just about conversations. It's about relationships. If it's all-or-nothing, and friendship means you've got to have major intimacy, then keeping control of your life and avoiding being used demand that you exclude almost everyone (or even everyone). There should be a middle distance — a near but not too near orbit — that's comfortable and understood. And not just on the internet.

IN THE COMMENTS: cronus titan said:

This has already been covered, and far better, in the novel Brooklyn by Colm Toibin (later made into a not bad movie) about a young Irish woman immigrating to the US. The novel explores the "small talk" of Ireland. In the novel, that "small talk" cleverly disguises manipulation and control honed over centuries in Ireland. The protagonist, Eilis Lacey, has trouble adjusting to the US because we do not waste time with much small talk. When an American speaks or flirts with her, Eilis just assumes there are a thousand angles being played. It is only when she returns to Ireland that she understands how that small talk will define her life (it is a bit more complex than that but that is the gist).

"Drought Reveals Giant, 4,500-Year-Old Irish Henge."

"The circular structure in the Boyne Valley was discovered by drone photographers searching for signs of hidden Neolithic sites" (Smithsonian).

So why do these ancient structures stand out during times of drought? The henges are actually a series of concentric circles created by placing large posts in the ground. When the henge fell out of disuse or was burned down, the underground portions of the posts rotted away, changing the composition of the soil in the posthole, causing it to retain more moisture. During a drought, while the surrounding crops yellow, the plants over the post holes have a slight advantage. “The weather is 95 percent responsible for this find,” Murphy tells Best. “The flying of the drone, knowledge of the area, and fluke make up the rest in this discovery.”

"Ireland is set to liberalize some of the world’s most restrictive abortion laws after exit polls suggested a landslide vote for change..."

Reuters reports.

Voters were asked if they wish to scrap the eighth amendment to the constitution, which gives an unborn child and its mother equal rights to life. The consequent prohibition on abortion was partly lifted in 2013 for cases where the mother’s life was in danger....

“Yes” campaigners argued that with over 3,000 women traveling to Britain each year for terminations - a right enshrined in a 1992 referendum - and others ordering pills illegally online, abortion is already a reality in Ireland.

Stephen Fry won't be charged — under Irish anti-blasphemy law — for calling God a "maniac."

But he was investigated. It didn't take long, but it still has a chilling effect on the freedom of speech in Ireland. Why does this law even exist?

Eoin Daly, a lecturer in law at the National University of Ireland, Galway, said Mr. Fry was never in any real danger of prosecution. He said the law was introduced in 2009 only because the country’s 1937 constitution required the country to have a blasphemy law, and an earlier one had been struck down in the courts.

Lawmakers did their best to make the 2009 law “almost unenforceable,” with broad exemptions to protect free speech, Mr. Daly said. “There was a constitutional obligation to legislate this offense, but it was not against the constitution to create an offense that was of no use.”

Even if it's unenforceable in the sense that no one will ever be convicted under it...

“We are deluded if we think that the 2009 law is not actively influencing, limiting, even dictating the content that we are offered by our national media,” Emer O’Toole, a professor of Irish Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, wrote on Monday in an op-ed in The Independent, a British paper. “And we are even more deluded if we think that we are living in a secular society.”

"I appeal to the men and women, to the boys and girls of Tralee, to dissociate themselves from this attempt to besmirch the name of our town for the sake of filthy gain."

"I ask the people to ignore the presence of this woman and her associates. They are attempting something that is contrary to the moral teaching of our faith, that is against our traditions and against the ordinary decencies of life, something that is against everything we hold dear."

Who declared "a simple, simple, simple belief that we share, that anything, anything, anything is possible" — and where was he when he said that?

Anything is possible if you say it 3 times.*

It was Joe Biden, in Ireland. 

What?! As Brexit happens, Joe Biden's in Ireland and Donald Trump is in Scotland, and both men are talking about their mothers. (Biden's mother had Irish ancestors, and Trump's mother immigrated from Scotland.)

[Biden] noted how his mother had instilled in him a pride in his Irish heritage, as well as “an absolute certitude that she or any of us were equal to any man or woman on Earth.”

Trump said:

I love the people of Scotland. That's why I built in Aberdeen in one of the great golf courses of the world.... I've gotten to know the people of Scotland so well and you know, through my mother and through everything else. The people of Scotland are amazing people....

______________________________
*

"The number of Americans seeking Irish passports since Donald Trump entered the US presidential race has jumped by 14%."

"The island of Inishturk off the coast of County Mayo is already advertising itself as an ideal spot for those wishing to come."

"I've heard there are quite a few people in America looking to move to Ireland and to other countries if Donald Trump becomes president," Inishturk Development Officer Mary Heanue told IrishCentral. "I'd like them to know that we would love to see them consider moving over here."

Okay. I looked at it on Google maps. Saw this:



And I just want to say: Nice lambscape. Nice wall.

"Early results suggest the Republic of Ireland has voted to legalise same-sex marriage in a historic referendum."

"If the change is approved, the Republic of Ireland would become the first country to legalise same-sex marriage through a popular vote."

Nice work, Ireland!

"Back at the market, I muse how the photos that I take invariably bring out what I think of as local and therefore interesting."

"You're not likely to find me taking a picture of the Polish guy who was standing on the street with hand extended asking for a few coins. Or of the stores along the main drag -- they have a ubiquitous face to them that could appear anywhere at all: places of cheap clothing, a few tattoo parlors, many barbers and butchers too. I like walking up one, peering into another, but my camera waits."

Weekending somewhere obscure in Ireland, Nina reveals her approach to censorship by photographic framing.

And this says something about why I don't — like Nina — put great effort into traveling to distant places. If I were in that Irish market with my camera, I would frame the discontinuities and weird juxtapositions. I'd be drawn to what would disappoint the traveler who's looking for the old world where things are authentic and true to that particular locality.

Nina's phrase is "local and therefore interesting," but what would seem interesting to me would be the inevitable intrusions of the non-local, the very things that spoil the trip for those who formed their  idea of what they would find if they expend great effort going somewhere from photographs framed as Nina has done.

There are many photographs at the link. It's all very romantic and beautiful in the photographs. Enjoy them. They are probably more enjoyable than taking the trip yourself. But for Nina, I believe that the trip is enjoyable in large part because she is searching for photographs like that, and it's a difficult search that requires a thought and skill. It's exciting and interesting because of the effort it takes to exclude what would not be pleasant to see. I suspect that just outside each frame is something jarring, like a Nike T-shirt or a Miley Cyrus magazine cover.

Think about that before you succumb to the fantasy that travel will be beautiful. These photographs are the lure but also the set-up for disappointment when you see that it's not like that at all, even if it is some non-touristy spot like Ballina by the Lough Derg or Limerick or wherever Nina has alighted.

Why are those German home-schooling parents seeking asylum in the United States?

Germany is in the European Union, which has a right to free movement, and Ireland, for example, offers a right to home-schooling. Here's email I received after yesterday's post about the case:

Pyramids lit up in green for St. Patrick's Day.

Ireland seeks to be "front and center in the world’s consciousness" today... and Egypt plays along.

The stolen heart: "It's completely bizarre."

"The thief would have needed metal cutters to prise open the iron bars protecting the wooden heart-shaped box holding St Laurence O'Toole's heart."

"Irish call for apology following 'Drunk Vomiting Shamrocks' clothing line."

"Urban Outfitters' St. Patrick's Day products, including a trucker’s cap illustrated with a drunk vomiting shamrocks and a 'Leprechaun P***' beer jug have, angered the Irish community in the United States and Ireland."