irish children: 24 June 2008

Today we went on a day trip to the town formerly known as Cove which was then known as Queenstown and is now known as Cobh. It was a dreary day and I had a rough evening out on the town (it was a group member’s birthday). We took a 15 minute train to visit the Heritage Center/ Queenstown Museum. The museum was dedicated to the immigration of the Irish, being a port city and the tragedies of the Lusitania and the Titanic. My favorite part of the day was the food and the train ride home with the Irish kids.

As everyone knows the Irish really helped settle the United States, what I did not realize was the Irish also helped settle Australia. Much of the settling was actually forced; the British sent many of the Irish to Australia because the prisons were filled. This seems like an extremely harsh punishment but I suppose it worked out in the end. It’s a bit warmer there with more consistent weather. That is quite an improvement from the erratic nature of Ireland’s weather.

Being a port city like Cobh entails international cruise liners, exporting and importing goods for the surrounding cities, the Irish navy and, of course, fishing. There were displays for all of these topics. The most interesting section in the museum was the start of the Irish navy. As an island I would expect there to be more of a navy than Ireland had. I suppose it is a testament to the amount of control that the British had over Ireland to not allow an island nation to have a navy.

I ate my first Irish meal today. It has taken me nine Irish days for me to have an actual Irish dish and it was worth the wait. I purchased a shepherd’s pie for the slightly pricey price of ten Euro. It was worth every cent.

Stuart and I sat on the train ride with several very young children from extremely different backgrounds that went to the same school. They were extremely chatty and excited to tell us what they had been up to. The boldest of the kids had sat down beside me, he was a tiny African child that only wanted to play soccer and refused to eat fruits and vegetables, despite Stuart and I recommending that it will make him big and strong. As I mentioned, the kids all came from different ethnicities. There were two Africans, one Pole, and one darker-skinned young girl from what could have been Italy, Iraq or Morocco.

The coolest thing about how different they looked was how they spoke. Every one of them had an Irish accent. The little fellow sitting next to me even corrected me when I said “three” by pronouncing it “tree.” Furthermore, when I asked if they spoke any other languages other than English, they responded with, “We don’t speak English, we speak Irish.” That was just a shock to my system. I had not realized that Irish was the language spoken. I believe that I witnessed how children are being instilled with a sense of Irish pride from a young age. From what I have heard from our guest lecturer there has been trouble with people trying to identify with what it means to be Irish, I think the school systems are doing a great job with the youngest generation to teach what Irish is. These kids were Irish despite their diversity. The train ride was one of the most telling intercultural connections that I have made with the Irish thus far.