Free Midlife Irish by Frank Gannon Page B

Irish people
     I talked to actually seemed to like the rain. The best day to Irish people is a day where the rain is misting, a “grand soft
     day.” You see happy faces when it’s raining in Ireland, something you would never see in, say, Philadelphia. You don’t know
     what dark thoughts the Irish may be thinking, but the Irish people do smile a lot.
    Almost all of the houses in the Irish countryside seem to be white. This also serves to set off the amazing glowing greenness
     that surrounds everything. If you are a fat slob in Ireland, dark green is a good fashion choice (avoid white or gray at all
     costs).
    In fiction and movies, Ireland seems to be a hilly place. It is, but not many of the hills get very big. I was surprised tofind out that only three of Ireland’s mountains exceed three thousand feet. They aren’t big hills, but there are a lot of
     them; you are never far from a hill or a mound or a small mountain, and there always seems to be one looming in the background.
     It’s hard to take a picture of the Irish countryside that doesn’t have some little mountain or hill behind whatever you’re
     taking a picture of.
    So it’s gray and white and green. Everything else is just several different shades of green with dots of gray and white. After
     a whole day of rambling around the Irish countryside, you get very used to long uninterrupted green. When you close your eyes,
     it’s still green. Then you drink some Guinness. Walk outside. Close your eyes. Open them. The green doesn’t go away.
    Whatever else it is, Ireland is great to look at, one of the great places in the world to go for a long bike ride. Throughout
     history, God’s deal with the Irish seems to have been, “You get a really pretty country, but that’s it. You get no optional
     equipment.”
    The Irish people have always worked extremely hard for very little. The land is tough farming because it’s so damn rocky and
     hilly. Most of the land requires a whole lot of preparation before you could even think about farming.
    Irish people consider a field without any rocks to be a wonderful thing. A man can be proud of his field because it took him
     countless hours to get all those rocks out of it. There is no farmland in Ireland like the great wide-open plains of the Midwest
     in America. Farming Ireland has always been absolutely brutal work.
    Unlike Wales and Britain and Scotland, Ireland has almost no coal or iron ore. The Industrial Revolution in Ireland was a
     very quiet affair. The country does have more peat (sod that is burned for heat and not for electricity), than anyplace else
     in Europe. You can always see huge fields of peat being cut in vast thin rows. The smell of burning peat instantly evokeshome for anybody who grew up in Ireland. If there is an “Irish smell,” it’s peat burning.
    At one time Ireland had as much as 311,000 hectares of bogland, land you could cut up for fuel. Today these boglands are disappearing
     fast. In twenty years, people told me, the bogs and the peat will be gone.
    Peat fires are a big part of the “romantic” picture of Ireland’s past that movies have helped to produce, but I’m sure that
     Irish people would rather have had the unromantic coal, or, better yet, oil.
    But if the peat will be gone soon, no one in Ireland seems overly concerned. If you mention “the peat crisis,” you are met
     with no alarm. You are told that Ireland has continually run out of things throughout history. The things it didn’t run out
     of, it didn’t have. So don’t sweat it.
    A woman in Cashel told me, “We’ve never had enough of anything, ever. We don’t even know what it’s like to have enough of
     anything. So big deal with no peat.”
    There never seems to be a “Plan B” in Ireland. The dominant attitude of the Irish people is definitely more grasshopper than
     ant.
    The West of Ireland is still basically a land of country people. The houses tend to be pretty far apart because most of