Van Diemen’s Land was the original name for the island of Tasmania, located 400 miles south of Melbourne, and notorious during the 1800s for its British-administered penal colonies. A significant Irish presence there consisted of convicts as well as forcibly deported political prisoners.
Previously: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 9: Lizard King in the City of Light — and on to Ireland.
Almost any discussion about Ireland is likely to focus the attention of beer lovers on Guinness Stout. There are other Irish stouts (Murphy’s, Beamish, etc.), and they’re excellent, but Guinness functions almost as a beloved synonym for Ireland itself.
So it was in 1985 that after two evenings in Dublin, my temporary travel mate Paul moved on to Galway. Reverting to the solitude of my own company (which always has been suitable for me), I made the trek to the sprawling Guinness brewery complex on the right bank of the Liffey for the daily tour.
Admittedly the tour wasn’t much of an “interactive experience” in those days, involving a short film in a small auditorium, viewing the contents of adjacent display cases, and proceeding to the bar for a couple pints of the black gold. There was a (required) voluntary contribution of a couple of Irish punts (currency pounds) to charity, and the “tour” was over without viewing even a square inch of stainless steel.
No matter. Guinness may not have been the Grand Tour, but it was a grand enough tour for a novice. I learned a few things, quenched my thirst and brought home knickknacks, including a bumper sticker and two patches that have reposed in a box for 40 years without dry-rotting.
“Guinness is good for you” is one of the beer world’s most famous advertising slogans, dating to the 1920s and credited to Dorothy Sayers. Although some medical studies have credited the positive effects of antioxidants in stout, it has become taboo in Ireland to make claims of health benefits deriving from alcoholic beverages.
We’re left to surmise that the intrinsic goodness of Guinness has been neatly grandfathered in, through all of eternity.
After all, “goodness” in the sense of emotional well-being cannot be measured by medical instruments. “Timelessness” also resists precise calibration.
However, you damn well know both when you feel them ― or, in the case of Guinness, when the timeless goodness is being poured by bartenders who know exactly what they’re doing.
At some point right about now (the summer of 2025), it has been 33 years since the first keg of Guinness in the long and generally ineffectual history of New Albany was tapped at the Public House formerly known as Rich O’s, since called the New Albanian Pizzeria & Public House. It is likely that the late Roz Tate was the first paying customer.
Assuming a conservative 45 kegs a year, that’s around 150,000 pints of Guinness sold at NABC since 1992 (likely what a Dublin local goes through during a normal week). In point of fact, we were the first draft Guinness account ever to exist in Floyd County, Indiana.
40 Years in Beer (Book II, Part 42): Barr built the bar, and the Guinness began pouring
You’re welcome. Selfless, heroic and groundbreaking innovations like this are why I’m now a Sagamore of the Wabash.
As an aside, three decades later only the oldest old-timers recall what those primitive times were like in terms of options. “Choice” was defined as different brands of the same insipid low-calorie “light” golden lager, with maybe a stray Bass Pale Ale or Watney’s Red Barrel in bottles for the fledgling beer snobs.
It’s obviously quite different now. Indiana and Kentucky are home to numerous breweries, and American craft brands and imports are widely available on draft and in a bewildering variety of packages. It has become difficult to find a bar, restaurant, barber shop or Hallmark holiday store that doesn’t carry a selection of IPAs.
Beer choice has won the day, even if too many local bars and restaurants still insist on gloriously photographing their Instagrammable food menu items with an utterly futile backdrop of insipid High Life, paltry Pabst or bootlicking Banquet.
I’d never seriously suggest that the paucity of options during 1990s was somehow preferable, and certainly it’s always better to have more choices, rather than fewer. At the same time, whacked-out spinning kaleidoscopes aren’t everyone’s idea of a viable default. Expanded choice and short attention spans have produced a condition in better beer aficionados akin to vertigo.
Happily, enforced orthodoxies usually engender a reaction akin to a rediscovery of first causes. In a broader sense, this has happened in Ireland since the time of my first visit in the form of widespread societal pushback against the excesses of the theocratic state.
As for me, a beer contrarian to the core, my own form of dissent in this, my dotage, is enjoying a lovely pint of Guinness whenever possible, and often multiple doses.
I don’t know if Guinness is good for you, but there is no doubt it is good for me. The Guinness Storehouse tells the story of the brewery since 1759, when founder Arthur Guinness “signed a lease for the St. James’s Gate Brewery, Dublin. He leased the brewery for 9000 years at an annual rent of £45.” And, the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) includes Guinness Draught in its style category 15B, Irish Stout.
Overall Impression: A black beer with a pronounced roasted flavor, often similar to coffee. The balance can range from fairly even to quite bitter, with the more balanced versions having a little malty sweetness and the bitter versions being quite dry. Draught versions typically are creamy from a nitro pour, but bottled versions will not have this dispense-derived character. The roasted flavor can range from dry and coffee-like to somewhat chocolaty.
In today’s fractured beer world, draught Guinness will strike many as far too simple a beverage, but to me the elemental, low-gravity, human-friendly essence of Guinness is the entire point of the exercise, throughout the past 266 years. It’s a fundamental beer precept, like teaching kids the alphabet before we turn them loose on novels by Thomas Pynchon.
I like lots of stouts in their varying interpretations — milk to imperial, tropical and extra, barrel-aged or oatmeal. Yet there remains something about Guinness via the nitro pour that is distinctive and dependable, still capable of eliciting great joy. And if your beer doesn’t make you joyful to the point of breaking spontaneously into song, why bother drinking beer in the first place?
After all, Irish music pairs wonderfully with Irish stout — and a drop of the harder stuff, too.
Almost any discussion about Ireland is likely to focus the attention of music lovers on the island’s amazing tunefulness.
Sitting at my home office desk in the year 2025, I’m surrounded by roughly 4,000 compact discs arranged in shelving units of varying sizes and shapes; in the home library down the hall, probably the same number of books line the walls. I’m told CDs are obsolete, but then again, so were the LPs packed into my tiny bedroom in Georgetown back when Ronnie Raygun was President, when I was planning my first trip to Europe.
Today vinyl once again is sought-after, and to an extent, cassette tapes have also made a comeback; plenty of the latter took up storage space in the cramped living quarters of my youth. At least I never bought into the dubious ethos of the 8-track, a fact of which I’m inordinately proud.
Approaching 65, I’ve not learned to work a saxophone or any other musical instrument, and if I so much as attempted to carry a tune across the street, the most predictable result would be two broken legs, or the moaning enmity of every damn dog in the neighborhood. Still, my earliest childhood memories are about music, and it is impossible to overstate the role music continues to play in my everyday world.
During the years prior to the summer of 1985, my musical consciousness was filled with the usual markers of a baby boomer male in his early twenties, with rock and pop the dominant influences, and MTV and FM radio the chosen mediums. However, perhaps unusually, my parents raised me on swing, jazz and the Great American Songbook; accordingly, for as long as I can remember, these have been major components of the music constantly playing in my head.
Just after college, formal composition began to please me, and I was a regular listener of WUOL, the University of Louisville’s classical FM station. Unfortunately, as genres go “world music” wasn’t on heavy rotation in metropolitan Louisville at that time, and this is where my cousin in academia, Donald Barry, re-enters the narrative.
Whenever Don drove back from Florida to visit his mother (my dad’s sister), he brought albums of Irish music with him. I’d enlist the help of friends with quality audio equipment to copy these albums onto cassettes. The performers were The Dubliners, Wolfe Tones, Tommy Makem, Clancy Brothers, The Chieftains, and other Irish folk bands, mostly from original pressings Don had purchased during his previous journeys to Ireland.
As an aside, The Pogues were about to come to my attention with the release of the band’s sophomore album, Rum Sodomy & the Lash on August 5, 1985.
Of course, music wasn’t the only cultural touchstone in my informal education about all things Irish. As a pedagogue in the finest of constructive senses, Don provided ample homework, with reading assignments that extended far past our summer interludes, including James Joyce (“Ulysses” is one thing; “Finnegan’s Wake” quite another), Seamus Heaney, John Synge, W.B. Yeats, and “The Green Flag,” Robert Kee’s masterful history of Ireland.
(As an aside, a book from more recent times that I highly recommend is We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, by Fintan O’Toole.)
Irish music helped to tell Irish history, and somewhere along the way it all became interwoven, with Guinness lubricating the synthesis. Don and I listened to bawdy tunes, weepy ballads and riotous calls to action. We also drank gallons of stout while doing so, and these were the best educational seminars ever.
My family background is almost entirely sharecropper German from the Pomeranian plains, with a sliver of more cosmopolitan bloodlines nearer the Black Forest, and a smidgen of English and Viking tossed into the mix. Once I’d experienced Irish culture. it always seemed there must be at least one stray shot of Irish DNA deep within me ― from a rogue, a wanderer, an outcast from the great Irish displacement ― who’d contributed to the family tree and then disappeared into the obscuring mists of time.
Recent DNA analyses resist such a conclusion, but I remain hopeful.
Musically, Ireland felt very comfortable, even if discomfort was the source of so many of the more overtly political songs, given that in terms of history, Ireland hasn’t always been such a happy or bucolic place.
Come all ye young rebels and list while I sing
For love of one’s country is a terrible thing
It banishes fear like the speed of a flame
And it makes you a part of the patriot’s game
—”The Patriot Game” (lyrics by Dominic Behan (see below); sung by the forgotten Dubliner, Bobby Lynch)
By 600 AD, Ireland’s original Celtic inhabitants had been converted to Catholicism. During the Dark Ages, Viking and Norman incursions were disruptive, but the marauders assimilated more often than not. A far more portentous invasion began in the 16th century, as launched by the 800-lb island lying directly to the east.
In 1534, King Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church and established his own Church of England, adding the Irish throne to his list of royal titles in 1541. Thus commenced more than 150 years of “plantation,” a policy wherein Protestants (primarily from England and Scotland) were settled in Ireland and afforded rights disproportionate to those of the indigenous Catholics, who steadily were disenfranchised and in many instances impoverished.
The area of heaviest Protestant settlement was Ulster, a cluster of six counties to the north. Today, this is known as Northern Ireland, which remains joined to the United Kingdom. Ireland’s other 26 counties were subject to the same Protestant favoritism, but retained Catholic majorities. These make up the contemporary Republic of Ireland.
In the early 1800s, sectarian strife grew amid the institutionalized disparities, with seemingly endless patterns of revolt and subjugation, culminating with a wild card blithely tossed by Mother Nature: A potato blight in the late 1840s, which deprived huge numbers of Irish Catholics of their primary source of sustenance.
The ensuing famine either killed or caused to emigrate more than 2,000,000 people, or one of four Irish men and women, and yet throughout the crisis, farms controlled by outsiders (most of them English) continued to export food, even though people around the corner were starving.
Neither for the first nor the last time, the British government’s ineptitude during the famine reignited a slow, smoldering movement for greater Irish autonomy. Through the remainder of the 1800s, the call for “Home Rule” grew stronger among Irish Catholics; little changed because Protestant-dominated Ulster threatened counter-measures of its own so that the whole would remain under British rule.
Just before the outbreak of WWI, it seemed as though a form of Home Rule might at last come to pass, but the conflict intervened. It was broadly agreed that domestic considerations would be placed on hold for the duration of the war. However, spotting an opportunity to force the issue while the British government was preoccupied with the war, radical Irish nationalists struck.
On April 24, 1916 (Easter Monday), rebels seized key buildings and installations of importance in Dublin, including the post office, and declared a free Ireland. It was called the Easter Rising; however, the Irish nation did not “rise up” as the rebels expected, and the revolt was mercilessly crushed by British troops.
Moreover, London responded to this provocation with calculated harshness toward a populace that in large measure had not heeded the revolutionary call, and all but a handful of the rebels were executed with maximum retaliatory cruelty. This brutality achieved what the rebels had not, finally turning Irish public opinion against British rule (at least among Catholics outside Ulster), and setting the stage for widespread ugliness.
It dutifully followed.
From 1916 through 1923, the contemporary configuration of Ireland was determined through a series of parliamentary maneuvers accompanied first by a triumphant war of independence against the British, and then a divisive civil war among the Irish themselves. By the early 1920s, the exhausted island was divided, and a template of periodic violence established for the ensuing decades.
It now has been more than a century since the Easter Rising, and just about everything else in Ireland has changed save for the division of the island into two entities. Fortunately “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland largely ended with the Good Friday Agreement, a brokered settlement in 1998, which was predicated on membership of both independent Ireland and the UK in the European Union.
Subsequently, the Irish Republic weathered the property bubble at the conclusion of its “Celtic Tiger” period of economic modernization, setting the stage for the UK’s ill-conceived Brexit to threaten harmony yet again. At present, the Northern Ireland Protocol allows Ulster to remain in the EU single market, thus preserving an open border on the island…for the time being. The relationship between Ireland and the UK seems destined to be difficult.
Roguish, hirsute and gravelly voiced, Ronnie Drew (1934-2008) founded the Irish hard folk band called the Dubliners. If not the purest of singers, he was a gifted storyteller in the oral tradition.
It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate set of vocal chords for wrapping around the spoken introduction to “McAlpine’s Fusiliers,” a song written by Dominic Behan, multi-talented brother of the more boisterous (and notorious) writer Brendan. This song, arguably Dominic’s most famous, considers the experience of Irish laborers in Britain during the Second World War.
‘Twas in the year of ‘thirty-nine when the sky was full of lead, when Hitler was heading for Poland, and Paddy for Holyhead.
Holyhead is the Welsh ferry port directly across the Irish Sea from Dublin, Paddy is longstanding slang for an Irishman, and the song refers to the curious fact that with nary an interruption, the Irish diaspora originally prompted by the 19th-century potato famine continued according to its traditionally sad cadence throughout the second horrendous international conflict, officially known within the fledgling Irish Republic not as a “war,” but as the “emergency.”
These semantics point to the anomaly that Ireland, minus its Ulster flashpoint, maintained strict neutrality throughout the conflagration of World War II. The situation was surreal at best, and for some, it symbolized a typically Irish response to calamity.
Diplomatic representatives of all warring nations were posted to Dublin in close proximity, Irish newspapers were censored to achieve fairness and balance for all warring nations (yes, including fascists and Nazis), and the chief unintended consequence of neutrality’s isolation was the near complete collapse of an already dysfunctional economy, as vast numbers of Irish male citizens migrated to an active belligerent (the UK), either by choice or circumstance, and became de facto combatants through war-related work or military service.
When the war was over, the questions arose: Had Ireland’s leader, Eamon de Valera, heroically preserved its shaky independence by adhering to neutrality, or had his hedging retarded the country’s standing in the post-war community of nations?
Were the Irish being traitorous to their acquired Anglo heritage by embracing neutrality, or were they as yet crafty Gaels, taking the only truly sane position in an utterly insane world?
Hence, another book worth reading: That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland during the Second World War, in which author Clair Wills thoughtfully surveys the length and breadth of the Irish experience during those troubled times.
Now forgotten to Americans, the controversies engendered by Ireland’s stance were extreme matters of life and death, especially for Britain during the Blitz. Irish independence was new, untested and in all respects a work in progress, and ties with the mother country still were painfully palpable. It was awkward, indeed.
Wills balances larger geopolitical issues by documenting the smaller nuances of everyday life in Ireland during the “emergency.” This requires a measure of probing, if superficially, the depths of the Irish collective psyche, an as yet unfinished task that has caused untold millions of pints of Guinness to be drained for more than two hundred years. Coldly sober, she dispassionately considers the many contradictions coexisting on the island before and since her period of focus during WWII.
During Europe’s war, unexpected consequences were in abundance in Ireland. Life became even tougher for the long suffering rural poor, who were enlisted into make-work schemes like a bizarre program calling for escalating quotas of peat to be cut (it was burned for fuel). This strikes me as eerily similar to Fidel Castro’s propaganda-laden sugar cane drives of the 1960s, and about as ineffective.
All the while, Ireland’s hotels and resorts remained packed, catering to a wealthy British clientele traveling to an otherwise poor country to eat and drink extravagantly, avoiding the inconvenience of dinnertime bombing at a time when rationing and austerity were norms back home.
Meanwhile, Catholic priests railed against the depravity of Europe, holding out a mystical vision of an autonomous, corporatist Ireland, one making good on the model of the Catholic dictator António de Oliveira Salazar in neutral Portugal.
The church somewhat hysterically feared the deleterious contagion of condom-carrying American GI’s temporarily billeted in Northern Ireland prior to the climactic Normandy invasion. Rigorous censorship was damaging to Ireland’s writers and artists, who were cut off from previously fecund streams of continental inspiration.
Even stranger, Ireland even had its own hardscrabble fascist cadres, although comparisons with the Marx Brothers in “Duck Soup” are more appropriate than the actual dimensions of the threat posed to civil order by these confused and disorganized elements.
I’m unwilling to pass judgment and render a verdict as to the ultimate significance of Irish neutrality during the “emergency.” In the end, it took the Allied victory, membership in the European Union, a vast transfer of wealth under the auspices of the EU and another half-century of effort (plus millions more pints of Guinness) for Ireland to even begin shaking the mixed legacies that can be traced back to the famine, a full century before the wartime period covered in Wills’ book.
Back to the wartime migrant workers:
I’ve worked till the sweat it has had me beat
With Russian, Czech, and Pole
On shuttering jams up in the hydro-dams
Or underneath the Thames in a hole
I’ve grafted hard and I’ve got my cards
And many a ganger’s fist across my ears
If you pride your life don’t join, by Christ!
With McAlpine’s fusiliers
My major point with respect to this lengthy digression into Ireland’s upheaval-laden history is that when I first stepped onto Irish soil, the elderly men and women seen reposing on park benches certainly had active memories of the tumultuous 20th century. They had lived through the infancy of the Free Irish State, and at the time, as I prepared to board a train from Dublin to the countryside, emigration remained the norm almost 150 years after the famine. In 1985, Ireland was as yet among the least well off relations of the European Union.
Perhaps their experiences, and those of their kinfolk abroad, explain the powerful longing for home that surfaces in so many of the classic Irish folk songs, as in my favorite, “Carrickfergus,” particularly as performed by the Dubliners, with vocals by Jim McCann and tin whistle by Ciarán Bourke (it might have been John Sheahan).
I wish I was in Carrickfergus
Only for nights in Ballygrant
I would swim over the deepest ocean
Only for nights in Ballygrant
But the sea is wide and I cannot swim over
And neither have I the wings to fly
I wish I had a handsome boatman
To ferry me over, my love and I
My childhood days bring back sad reflections
Of happy times we spent so long ago
My boyhood friends and my own relations
Have all passed on like the melting snow
And I spent my days in ceaseless roving
Soft is the grass and my bed is free
Oh to be back now in Carrickfergus
On that long winding road down to the sea
Now in Kilmeny it is recorded
On marble stones there as black as ink
With gold and silver I would support her
But I’ll sing no more now till I get a drink
‘Cause I’m drunk today and I’m seldom sober
A handsome rover from town to town
Ah but I’m sick now, my days are numbered
Come all you young men and lay me down
Then, of course, there’s a different song for remembrance.
During my week off the continental grid in Ireland, I experienced the musical pub format for the first time: fiddles and tin whistles, guitars and banjos, jigs and reels, and pints of stout all around, with everyone in the room seemingly capable of singing better than the actual performers (and willing to do so if given the opportunity).
Guinness-powered conversation was even better. In the barrooms, there was a deep reverence for the collective Irish historical experience, desperate and undernourished as it been so often. The former British colonial overlord seemed to inspire amusement, annoyance and even periodic affection; while those olden times were a significant portion of the national narrative, they were gone, come what may.
Nor would Ireland be returning to its Gaelic-speaking past, even when the often ham-fisted, Catholic-dominated government insisted it try. There was a misty Euro-future somewhere beyond the foggy dew, though honestly, it couldn’t yet be seen with clarity. In 1985, the Celtic Tiger had yet to roar, and property neither boomed nor burst.
There was plenty of gallows humor, mordant and defeatist, yet playful and vibrantly patriotic, looking always to a different and better life ahead in spite of the horrendous pratfalls of the past. This included good-humored bawdiness about drinking and whoring and the nobility of true love, as in this anecdote.
In the Irish love triangle there are three parties involved: A man, and a woman – and drink. And so the girl gives an ultimatum to her boyfriend: It’s either the drink, or me. And, he chooses the drink. But afterwards, he relents. They get married and live happily ever after … the three of them.
This valuable cultural education really began only after I departed Dublin. No offense to the capital city, which probably ranks second only to London in terms of literary prowess in the English language – Ireland’s second tongue, mind you. Rather, it was a manifestation of intent … and exhaustion.
Pecetto Torinese had been my last port of call situated anywhere near the countryside, and this northern Italian interlude was more than a month previous to landfall in Eire. I may have been developing into an urbanite, but the metamorphosis wouldn’t come without occasional growing pains.
Consequently, what I most wanted to do in Ireland in the summer of 1985 was find somewhere pleasingly rural, although not so isolated that more than five or six days would be required to find my way back to Rosslare and the ferry to France.
An Irish stereotype was urgently needed, perhaps a regular provincial town, one with open spaces nearby for rambling and scenery for reflection. Pubs were a requirement (although just try locating a square inch of Ireland without three or more of them within stumbling distance), and relatively cheap eats.
This town needed to be accessible by train, because that way, tickets back and forth already were paid via the Eurailpass. Looking at a map, the Irish national railways could be seen radiating from Dublin like spokes from a wheel’s center. One might easily travel by rail south to Cork or west to Galway, but not to both on the same trip by rail without first returning to Dublin. Buses, not passenger railroads, connected the spokes to each other.
Upon reflection, the small city of Sligo seemed the ideal destination. It is situated to the northwest of Dublin on Ireland’s western coast, with a natural harbor dating to ancient times and the Atlantic Ocean stretching over the horizon to infinity.
The word “Sligo” itself was utterly alien to me, but sounded estimably Irish and in fact is anglicized from the Gaelic name Sligeach, meaning “abounding in shells” or “shelly place.” While there wasn’t time enough to explore rugged Donegal, where the original Gaelic tongue still could be heard, there was at least an element of bucolic isolation. I chose Sligo, and never regretted it.
But to close this installment of the pilgrimage, allow me to honor Luke Kelly, who was a towering figure of Irish music in the 20th century.
In December, 1983, a gravely ill Kelly appeared for the last time with the Dubliners, in a performance shown on Irish television. Kelly died of a brain tumor in January, 1984, 18 months before my feet touched Irish soil for the first time. The group continued to work until 2012, when it disbanded after the last surviving original member passed away.
The lovely song itself, with opening lines that seem to presage the singer’s imminent departure, is a composite of several “night visiting” songs — not from Ireland, but Scotland. Turns out Kelly’s grandmother was a MacDonald. Truly, we never know where the music will take us.
Kelly might have chosen an easier song to perform. It’s as if he knew, and instead chose a testament. At least once each year, I succumb to a week’s immersion in the Dubliners, listening to songs, watching the group’s performances and absorbing video documentaries.
The performance of this particular song affects me more deeply with the passing years. Ultimately, we all must away. If you’ll excuse me now, I seem to have gotten something in my eye. It happens every time.
(By the way, Lankum is incredible. Maybe an old dog can learn new tricks.)
