Free Tipperary by Frank Delaney Page B

I reflected on our traveling across the country, and as I could hear Father's laughter downstairs, where he took a drink with our hosts, I would have said that it had been one of the most beautiful, serene days of my life. I have had many more since, but that day on which I first crossed the Shannon into the West of Ireland remains for me one of my most memorable.
    Next day we bowled into Galway city, all bridges and cobblestones. I chiefly recall watching a basket-maker in the square outside our hotel, and being transfixed by the speed of his hands as he wove the hard strands into firm patterns. The hotel introduced me, I feel, to a taste for such comforts that still directs part of my life. For me, to this day, the most restful moments come when I luxuriate in a great hotel, receiving my meals with deferential service and sleeping between starched linens.
    We stayed there for two days, and during our first breakfast, Father counseled Euclid, Nora, and myself to tell nobody of our destination. In the many conversations that we overheard in the hotel, the name of Knock recurred frequently. All remarks had the same tone: “Do you believe it?” and “I suppose it is possible” and “Don't you know what they have up there now? Miracles! They have a miracle nearly every hour.”
    All of this threw Euclid and Nora Buckley into states of fantastic longing, with Euclid whispering to me at every turn, “Do you think we'll see an apparition?” Nora worried, “If such holy folks appeared—well, when they're gone, what's to stop the Devil comin'?” (She, of course, pronounced it “Divil.”)
    My father, I know, also felt excitement, but his anticipation derived from the opportunity to meet those local people who had actually seen the Virgin Mary on the gable wall of the church in the rain. Yet he did not wish people to think him religious, and that is why he asked us not to divulge our destination. He justified his journey by saying, “You know, people should always make a pilgrimage to a phenomenon.”
    After Galway, we spent two days out in Connemara, lingering by the lakes of Corrib, Mask, and Carra. My father had fished the mayfly there, and he told us of those brilliant early summer days when, for one week, men would come “from all over the world.” He continued, “Now if you fellows were here that week, you'd make a fortune catching that mayfly in glass bottles and selling it to the anglers for their bait.”
    The light over the lakes seemed to change every half minute, and we saw rainbow after rainbow.

    This paragraph comes from a County Mayo guidebook:

    In August 1879, more than a dozen local people in the hamlet of Knock, in the county of Mayo, reported an apparition that is still venerated today. This was never rich land. Oliver Cromwell chose not to bring his marauders over here because one of his generals had reported that the country west of the Shannon contained “not enough water to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him.” The apparition, however, brought fame and fortune, as such mystical occurrences do. Hundreds of similar appearances by the Virgin Mary have been recorded, most prominently, Fátima, Garabandal, Guadalupe, Lourdes, and Medjugorje in Croatia.

    In all those cases, and in Knock, too, the life of the surrounding countryside changed for the better. Lourdes, originally a village near a cave in the Pyrenees, gained a huge infrastructure. With a basilica and an airport, it attracts pilgrims from all over the world daily, to be dipped naked in the miraculous waters.
    At Fátima, visitors rip the skin off their legs as they traverse a huge plaza on their knees, praying as they inch the hundreds of yards from the bus parks to the steps of the basilica.
    Knock, when the apparition was reported, suffered the official Church skepticism with which all such reports are typically greeted. But the local people and their clergy prevailed. For them, whether they said so or