Day: February 11, 2020

Yesterday was blustery, and rainy in patches. We decided to explore the east side of town across the river, past the first (last) bridge where the big ships are still able to dock.

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I believe the buildings on the right are part of the bonded warehouses.

There’s a fair bit of new construction in the area, hundreds of thousands of square feet of “a new kind of work space for a new kind of work,” or some such nonsense. I suppose it will be interesting to see how that turns out in 4 years or so.

Continuing a few blocks east, we found ourselves at the train station. We plan on taking the train to Cobh and Midleton over the next few weeks, so we spent some time there.

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Got into a long talk with one of the senior attendants at the station, a man roughly my age. I guess he was looking for a break, without seeming to be taking one. He showed us some of the less obvious historical features of the station. He also had some interesting ideas about the US Civil War, about which i’ll ruminate later in this post.

After the station, we decided to walk up the hill to the neighborhood called St. Luke’s Cross. The steeple of the namesake church is the most prominent landmark of the neighborhood, though it can’t be seen from our apartment. We made our way there. The neighborhood gets posher the higher up the hill you get.

Up the hill to the church.

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And the church itself.

We kept popping in and out of rain squalls, so we ended up ducking into a coffee shop across the street called Rant. First time i’ve seen people i’d describe as old hippies in Ireland, and a little research helps to understand why.

We walked back into town along the Lower Glanmire Road, till it connected to Summer Hill, and then into the Victorian Quarter. It’s a bit of a high street along that stretch.

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Afterwards, we ducked out of yet another squall and into the Crawford Art Gallery, the municipal museum in the heart of town. It’s located in the old Custom House, from when the docks extended further upriver. I was pleased to discover there are Pastafarians in Ireland.

But i had mentioned earlier a conversation in the train station. A couple of weeks back, on our way down to Cork from Athlone, we stopped in Cashel, to visit the Rock of Cashel, which isn’t really a rock. We ended up walking through a private “museum” of sorts. Basically, just a collection of random artifacts down the hill from the castle, organized into a semblance of a narrative of Irish history over the past couple of hundred years. The proprietor expressed some dissatisfaction with the stories from the States about Confederate statues being removed from the public square, because, you know, history. I was kinda caught out, not expecting to have these conversations here, so i basically disagreed with him, and changed the subject back to Irish history. But i made some mental notes about my response if i encountered that again.

And sure enough, the guy in the train station made almost exactly the same comment. Apparently, the rebel nature of the Confederacy appeals to some segment of the population here, who also consider themselves rebels and the children of rebels.

And it occurs to me that the great con of the Confederacy is claiming the mantle of rebellion for itself. If the Confederacy was about anything, it was about maintaining the status quo of the elites of the day in the face of the mounting anti-slavery rebellion. Slavery had been enshrined in the new country from its founding. The anti-slavery movement began immediately. It represented the change. The reactionaries were pro-slavery. John Brown represented the rebellion. Harriet Tubman represented the rebellion. Sojourner Truth represented the rebellion. In Star Wars terms, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were the Emperor and Darth Vader.

And how they’ve managed to portray themselves, over 150 years after their deaths, as rebels to a people 4000 miles away remains one of life’s mysteries. But if we do settle here, i know what one of my tasks will be.