Notes on the Republic of Ireland II (June 29-July 2, 2026)
Two counties lay between.
June 29 (Monday). Slane to Dublin. 8.30 am: Off to visit the Brú na Bóinn settlements at Knowth and Newgrange. Together, they’re a UNESCO World Heritage site. Here, the Public Works Office of Ireland have custodianship of Europe’s largest collection of megalithic artefacts. The Welcome Centre, tours, and exhibitions were among the best I’ve ever visited.
These are places of burial, community, agriculture, and religion. The people who’d constructed the tombs were migrants from Anatolia, in Turkey. They’d have been dark eyed, dark skinned, and with dark hair. The domed enclosures looked like either grassed-over flying saucers or the habitat of some off-world plantation colony. The structures predate Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids. This community’s outlook on life is as remote from ours today as would be that of aliens from a far planet.
And yet, we can grasp their endeavour, and longing for somewhere and something beyond the here and now. The petroglyphs were startling in their consistency and iconographic rigour. Spirals, concentric circles, solar motifs, hexagonal grids, and snaking lines – which covered the over 400 stones encircling the base of the mounds – spoke of mapping (either of the earth or the heavens), ‘language’, and journeys. We know that we shall never know their significance fully. The acceptance of mystery is the entrance to understanding.
At Newgrange, a few miles from Knowth, I was ushered into the interior chamber of the great tumulus. Lights were turned off, and a simulation of the sun entering the dark interior through the door’s aperture at the Solstice sunset, performed. Lo and behold! Nearly 4,000 years before the invention of photography – the invention of the camera.
After its discovery by workers in 1699, Newgrange was recorded by the Welsh Antiquarian Edward Llywd, and a drawing made by his compatriot, the artist Will Jones.
4.15 pm: I arrived in Dublin. I’ve neither been here before nor had an image of the city in my head.
June 30 (Tuesday). 10.00 am: I took a tour of Trinity College Dublin under the guidance of one of its former BA/MA graduates – who acquitted themselves admirably. The university offers a competitive scholarship that pays for the winner’s tuition fees, subsistence, accommodation, and a daily three-course dinner from BA to PhD level. (Truly jaw-dropping.) It’s a lovely campus, with some exquisite architecture.
11.00 am: A view of the Book of Kells exhibition. Given the turbulent history the book has endured, it’s astonishing that we still have the artefact to admire. It was made around 800 AD, and begun of the isle of Iona. Hardly historical at all on the scale that I’ve encountered over the past few weeks. Afterwards, I took in the university’s magnificent library.
1.30 pm: I arrived at 15 Ushers Island, on the banks of the River Liffey. This is one of the settings for John Huston’s 1987 adaptation of James Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’ (1914). Joyce had specified the house in the text. It’s a place of pilgrimage for those who, like me, deeply admire both the story and the film (or ‘filim’, as they say locally).
5.30 pm: Evensong at St Patrick’s Cathedral. I bagged a prime seat. In Ireland, the King is not prayed for, of course. 5.30 pm: A burger to end all burgers (beef, locally sourced), with waitress service, and in a restaurant with an underground bunker-aesthetic that shouts: ‘We are not McDonalds! We are not Burger King!’
Remembering Mam, who taken behind the veil 39 years ago today. Song for My Mother (2025).
July 1 (Wednesday). Proof of presence.
10.30 am: The National Gallery of Ireland. But where is local lad Francis Bacon’s work? Neither in the modern nor European sections, it turns out. However, there’s a whole room dedicated W B Yeats’s brother Jack B Yeats’s second-rate sloshings. I wondered whether Bacon had suffered the same fate as Samuel Beckett, who also left Dublin for foreign shores. (Joyce did too.) Beckett lived in France and was considered a French writer. Until, that is, he received the Noble Prize for Literature. Thereafter, he was taken back as a Son of Ireland. The city is rather provincial, in my opinion. Wales has exhibited the same malaise in past.
Good to see William Scott again, as well as Vermeer’s Woman Writing a Letter, with Her Maid (c. 1670), which I’d last encountered in Amsterdam in 2023.
11.45 am: The National Museum of Ireland’s archaeological collection has a very old-school and welcome approach to display. Not a button to press in sight. And no digital video rendering of a warrior wielding a sword from the collection, charging towards the hapless visitor at break-neck speed. ‘I can imagine this myself, thank you very much!’ (I get vaguely travel-sick watching these ‘immersive experiences’.) I was here to see some of the treasures dug up at the Neolithic sites that I’d visited during the holiday.
1.00 pm: An amble in and out of the department stores and cafes around O’Connell Street. The towns and cities of Ireland have more pharmacies within a 50 km radius than there are tablets in a paracetamol blister pack. In Aberystwyth, we have only one in the town centre. I came across a roadside shrine representing Jesus, dedicated to the safety of taxi drivers.
3.30 pm: A two-hour political history walking tour of Dublin. We met the guide where a memorial to Horatio Nelson had once stood. It was blown up by Irish Republicans in 1966. Our interpreter used the cityscape to illustrate his talk well. He took in a period from the first settlers in the Neolithic period to the present day with, understandably, a focus on the potato famine, the development of Irish nationalism, the cause of independence, and the Troubles (from a southern perspective). The British government at the time had a great deal to answer for. We toured the Famine Memorial and the site of the Abbey Theatre (Ireland’s National Theatre), and concluded at the Garden of Remembrance.
July 2 (Thursday). My last day in Ireland. 10.30 am: I returned to the GPO Museum on O’Connell Street, where the political tour began yesterday.
It houses an exhibition dedicated to the Easter Rising and Dublin during the First World War. It was yesterday’s story, only copiously illustrated with artefacts on this occasion. (I’ve a particular fondness for period posters.) At the end of the exhibition is a large, digital memorial on the which the names of those killed in the Easter Rising are slowly revealed, line-by-line. Elegant and respectful.
I’m of an age when the day must be liberally punctuated by cups of tea in order to be viable.
12.45 pm: I returned to the restaurant where I’d enjoyed the best ever beef burger on Tuesday evening. ‘Every time I anticipate eating a burger, I’ve an ideal in my head. Almost always, the reality is disappointing. But your burgers match my expectations in every respect’, I philosophised, as the waitress waited patiently.
4.45 pm: The ferry left Dublin Port ‘space dock’ at ‘impulse power’, and headed for Caergybi [Holyhead], Wales. Apparently, from a high-point overlooking the bay that opens onto the Irish Sea you can, on a clear day, see the mountain range of Yr Wyddfa [Snowdon]. Some claim that the east coast of Ireland can be spied from the top of Constitutions Hill, Aberystwyth, under the same conditions.
7.00 pm: ‘Land, ahoy!’ Once I could see the coastline of Ynys Môn [Anglesey] and the mountain ranges along the Llŷn Peninsula, my heart says ‘home’. I looked northward across the waves to where the Isle of Man would be visible in around half-an hour’s time. The northern Irish Sea showed herself to be a pure turquoise as it struck the side of the ferry. Clear on top, but dark beneath. This was the sea that I look out upon from the Promenade at Aberystwyth every week. By the time I stand there again, I’ll have travelled over 1,200 miles.
Notes on Northern Ireland (June 15-18, 2026)
Notes on the Republic of Ireland I (June 18-28, 2026)
See also: Intersections (archive); Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Studium; Academia; Facebook: The Noises of Art; Bluesky; Instagram; @Threads; YouTube; Archive of Visual Practice