Finding Myself
In Ireland
By Barbara McNally
A
lmost ten years ago, I took
my first trip to Ireland,
where I found images and
parts of me that I didn’t
know existed. I found them
in faces and personalities all around
me; in their laughter and ability to
laugh at themselves; in scenery;
castles and cottages; in the
w eather—stormy and changeable like
myself; in the roads: driving on the
“wrong side of the road” (the story
of my life); in their music and
dancing that made me feel alive and
proud to be Irish; in their passion for
independence and self expression in
any form; and in their stories of
heroes and villains, sinners and
saints—all that is within me. It was
like going HOME after a long absence
away from my friends and family. It
was like coming home to myself.
My inspiration for the trip was my
Irish Grandma Pat. After she passed
away at 92, my mother and I came
upon a collection of photographs
among her effects—of 70-year-old
Grandma Pat baring her breasts,
wearing not much more than
feathers and furs. All my life, I’d
been compared to my Grandma Pat,
the armrest and putting his stuff
on my tray table. I’d booked my flight
at the last minute. I hadn’t booked
a hotel room or reserved a rental car.
I didn’t even know how long I’d be
gone. Aside from a vague notion of
going to Westport, the small coastal
town in County Mayo where my
great-great-grandmother Bridget
O’Dwyer was born, I didn’t have
a plan. With no timetables or
itineraries, no maps or travel guides
to follow, it was a flying-by-theseat-of-my-pants kind of trip.
However, when I landed at Shannon
Airport, I discovered I had no pants
because my luggage didn’t make it.
During my 23 years of marriage, I’d
let my husband plan all of our family
vacations. But this time, he would
not be sitting beside me, hogging
44
I would start my adventure single
and ready to mingle in Dingle.
It was August—peak tourist
season—but I managed to get the
last rental car at the airport; a
“super-compact” little blue Fiat 500.
Maybe a good thing my luggage
hadn’t arrived, because it probably
wouldn’t have fit. I drove out of the
airport (on the left side!) and kept
driving until I saw a sign for a
destination that I found impossible
to resist: Dingle, 70 km; not Dublin
nor Donegal; not Cork nor Kerry;
not even Westport, where my
great-great-grandmother was born.
a flapper and suffragette who was
bold and passionate. But discovering
these racy photos, I realized I was
nothing like her. I’d just gotten out
of a deeply dependent marriage and
was finally free, but I didn’t know
what to do with my freedom. So with
Grandma Pat as my internal guide,
I struck out alone toward the
shores of this faraway country.
I didn’t know what to call what I was
doing: A vacation; a voyage? I was on
a trip to rediscover myself by going
back to my roots. It was a recreation of the person I longed to
become, a rebirth. I had a feeling
that if I traveled back through the
archways of history, I might find in
my Irish ancestors some reflection of
my lost self, some thread that I could
carry into the future. Ireland was
the best of both worlds—completely
foreign and new to me, but also
deeply embedded in my DNA.
I believed that, on the Emerald Isle,
I could tap into something primal,
mysterious, and true.
Also, in the late 1970s, British
adventurer Tim Severin journeyed
from the Dingle Peninsula to North
America in a handcrafted replica of
Brendan’s curragh, a rugged little
sailing vessel. Severin successfully
reenacted Saint Brendan’s brave sail,
but what I found most fascinating
was that Saint Brendan was fortysix years old when he set sail across
the Atlantic—the same age as I on
my first trip to Ireland.
Looking back, it seems fitting that
I started my exploration of Ireland
on the Dingle Peninsula. I read that
Saint Brendan the Navigator began
his journey to North America—
nearly one thousand years before
Columbus—from Dingle. Brendan was
an Irish monk born in 484. In 530,
he embarked on a journey that lasted
seven years. Scholars disagree as
to how far Brendan traveled, but
archeologists have documented the
presence of ancient Irish runes in
West Virginia.
The scenery was enchanting, rolling