Free Jaywalking with the Irish by Lonely Planet Page B

apparent reason. We had no idea what motivated this – Laura’s foreign accent? Our strange gate behavior? Our newness? The size of our garden? Furious, I marched forward and gave the young culprit a good dressing-down. But this was far too direct, and not at all the way things are handled in Ireland.
    Undoubtedly the young lass had gotten the idea she wasn’t fully welcome in our garden, whether this was or was not true. So she got even. Little did I know that it was not our place as newcomers to remonstrate. Her heavy-set older brother made that clear by driving his bicycle straight at my much smaller boys whenever they ventured onto the common pavement of Bellevue Park. Appeals to his better nature fell flat, so then I warned him that I would not tolerate further bullying. That evening we returned from a pleasant stroll and discovered that our kids’ garden play furniture had been smashed to bits.
    Suddenly, our new lives seemed less carefree.
    Another neighbor came by for a hello, and a “No, I couldn’t possibly, well okay, just a sip of wine.” We did the how-do-you-do, then moved to the Big Issue. “My mother thinks you’re crazy not to close the gate. She’s been talking about it every day, but she’s like that.”
    He’d given us a direct warning, then disguised it, as Irish people always do to cloud their meanings. In Cork, the lexicon of the unsaid runs deep, and conflicts are discussed in parables.
    In the nearby John Henchy’s & Sons public house, I met a raconteur with shoulders as broad as Bun’s and a surname in common as well – a distant cousin named Seamus Wilkinson. He told riveting stories about his native Galtee Mountains in Tipperary, about his father’s exploits in the Irish Republican Army during the War of Independence, about various foreign adventures, about, it seemed, everything near and dear. Wonderfully gregarious, Seamus soon brought us a gift the next morning of fish he’d just caught. Yet it took ten months before Seamus revealed that he spent many weekends looking after the dying and infirm in the local hospice and chaperoned a yearly contingent seeking miraculous redemption in Lourdes.
    “Why do people in this country hold onto their secrets so fervently; why the half-closed gate?” I asked my new friend.
    “If you tell people too much, they’ll start talking about you,” Seamus said.
    Out. In. A newcomer to Ireland had better learn those nuances. They speak of gatekeeping, of ancient suspicion and deep guardedness in this land where the legions of informers to the occupying British and the Normans and Danes before them were the most reviled of toads. The burgeoning economy has created countless entrepreneurs like Seamus, who is a very successful builder. But nearly every one still watches their back and works their invisible conversational gates deftly, like dealers in a sleight-of-hand game of shells. Too much openness will merely get you dismissed as naive.
    “You don’t hear me talking about the mortar and the damp-proofing on my building sites, do ye now? When you go in a pub, you just talk about things that are light and easy and see what drifts up to the surface,” said one of the more self-assured persons I’d met yet.
    Another acquaintance from Dublin, which now holds nearly half the country’s population, put it more strongly. “Just be cautious, because you never know who’s listening and what will happen with the information they get about you around here. Tell people as little as they need to know, especially here in Cork. In Dublin, they can be as ‘in your face’ as any American, but they are not that way here at all. There is a certain Cork type who says one thing when he means another, and if you respond too directly, he’ll just look at you and smile. But this kind of fellow actually despises being challenged or suffering the slightest offence, especially by a foreigner. It’s like the Japanese when it comes to saving face. Hit this type of