Rick Steves - Rick Steves Ireland 2019

Faces of Ireland now and then (at Dublin Castle and the Giants Causeway)

Though a small island, Ireland has had a large impact on the rest of the world. Geographically isolated in the damp attic of Dark Age Europe, Christian Irish monks tended the flickering flame of literacy, then bravely reintroduced it to the barbaric Continent. Ireland later turned out some of modern literatures greatest authors, including W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Oscar Wilde. In the 1800s, great waves of Irish emigrants fled famine and colonial oppression, seeking new opportunities abroad and making their mark in the US and beyond. (Every Irish family seems to have a relative in America; about 50 million people claim Irish descent in North America alone.) And although peace now prevails in Northern Ireland, the religious and political conflict there long held the worlds attention.

Northern Ireland (with 1.8 million people) is a province of the United Kingdom (like Scotland and Wales), while the Republic (with 4.8 million people and 80 percent of the land) is an independent nation. No visit to Ireland is complete without a look at both.

The Republic of Ireland boasts more sights, from the famous Book of Kells manuscript, prehistoric ruins, Celtic artifacts, and evocative monastic settlements to Iron Age ring forts. The country is bordered by green hilly peninsulas, craggy islands, and sheer cliffs rising up from the crashing waves of the Atlantic.

A ceilidh (KAY-lee) is an evening of music and dance...an Irish hoedownand can be one of the great Irish experiences. Youll find traditional Irish music in pubs all over Ireland. Sessions (musical evenings) may be advertised events or impromptu (and quality can be hit or miss), but either way things get going at about 21:30though Irish punctuality is unpredictable. Last call for drinks is just before midnight.

Pub music ranges from traditional instrumentals (merry jigs and reels) to ballads (songs of tragic love lost or heroic deeds done) to sing-along strummers. Sessions generally feature a fiddle, a flute or tin whistle, a guitar, and a bodhrn (BO-run, goatskin drum), sometimes joined by an accordion or mandolin. The music often comes in sets of three songs. The wind and string instruments embellish melody lines with lots of tight ornamentation.

Percussion generally stays in the background. The bodhrn is played with a small, two-headed club; the performer stretches its skin by hand to change tone and pitch. More rarely, youll hear the crisp sound of a set of bones: two cow ribs (boiled and dried) that are rattled in one hand like spoons or castanets, substituting for the sound of dancing shoes in olden days.

Watch the piper closely. The Irish version of Scottish Highland bagpipes, the uilleann (ILL-in) pipes are played by inflating the airbag (under the left elbow) with a bellows (under the right elbow) rather than with a mouthpiece. Uilleann is Irish Gaelic for elbow, and its sound is more melodic, with a wider range than Highland pipes. The piper fingers the chanter to create individual notes, and taps the chanter on his thigh to close the end and raise the note one octave. He uses the heel of his right hand to play chords on one of three regulator pipes. It takes amazing coordination to play this instrument well, and the sound can be haunting.