Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
In Northern Ireland, murals in sectarian neighborhoods (such as the Shankill and Falls
Roads in Belfast and the Bogside in Derry) are stirring public testaments to the martyrs
and heroes of the Troubles.
Since the Book of Kells, Ireland's greatest contributions to the world of art have been
through words. As there was no Irish Gaelic written language, the inhabitants of Ireland
were illiterate until Christianity came in the fourth century. Far from ignorant, Celtic so-
ciety maintained a complex set of laws and historical records and legends...verbally. The
druidic priests and bards who passed down this rich oral tradition from generation to gen-
eration were the most respected members of the clan, next to the king. After Christianity
transformed Ireland into a refuge of literacy (while the rest of Europe crumbled into the
Dark Ages), Charlemagne's imported Irish monks invented “minuscule,” which became
the basis of the lowercase letters we use in our alphabet today. The cultural importance
placed on the word (spoken, and for the past 1,500 years, written) is today reflected in the
rich output of modern Irish writers.
Threehundredyearsago,Dublinnative
Jonathan Swift
created hismasterpiece,
Gulli-
ver's Travels,
as an acidic satire of British colonialism. It pokes fun at religious hard-liners
and the pompous bureaucrats in London who shaped England's misguided Irish policies,
and ironically has survived as a children's classic.
William Butler Yeats,
also born and raised in Dublin, dedicated his early writings in
the 1880s to the “Celtic Twilight” rebirth of pride in mythic Irish heroes and heroines. His
early poems and plays are filled with fairies and idyllic rural innocence, while his later
poems reflect Ireland's painful transition to independence. Yeats' Nobel Prize for literature
(1923) was eventually matched by three later, Nobel-winning Irish authors:
George Bern-
ard Shaw
(1925),
Samuel Beckett
(1969), and
Seamus Heaney
(1995).
