An Irish Country Wedding

Authors: Patrick Taylor

BOOK: An Irish Country Wedding

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To Dorothy

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

A friend recently remarked, “You always put acknowledgments at the start of your books. Why? Nobody ever reads them.”

That may or may not be true, but without certain very impor
tant people you would not be reading the rest of this work and I
would feel remiss unless I tendered my most unreserved thanks, and in no special order, to:

Simon Hally, Natalia Aponte, Tom Doherty, Carolyn Bateman, Paul Stevens, Irene Gallo and the art department, Gregory Manchess, Rosie and Jessica Buckman, Don Kalancha and Joe Meier, Patty Garcia and Alexis Saarela, everyone in sales, Christina MacDonald, and finally to all of you who read and enjoy this series and keep me at my keyboard.

Go raibh mile maith agat agus beannacht De agat,
Thank you very much and God bless you.

A
UTHOR
’
S
N
OTE

To old readers, it’s grand to have you back in the village of Ballybucklebo, and to new readers,
cead mile fáilte,
a hundred thousand welcomes. Come in, sit down, and stay for a while.

This is the seventh book in the Irish Country Doctor series and in it I have made one important deviation from the usual. If you can bear with me, I offer this short explanation of why I have done so.

In all of
Country Wedding
’s predecessors, I skimmed over Irish politics. This deliberate refusal to weave the sad history through the stories applied equally to
Country Girl,
set in County Cork around the time of the Irish Civil War of 1922–23 (West Cork was a Republican stronghold), and to
Student Doctor,
set in Dublin in the 1930s, where the abortive Easter Rebellion of 1916, the subsequent 1918–1921 Anglo-Irish War, and the Civil War had all left unhealed wounds. Those works set in Ballybucklebo in the mid-’60s were only four years before the outbreak of thirty years of
virulent internecine violence in the north of Ireland. Even then I
barely alluded to the sectarian undercurrents that preceded “the Troubles.”

I deliberately failed to do so for what seemed to me to be a cogent reason.

In the ’90s I had written three gritty books set firmly in the
squalor of the recent troubles in Northern Ireland. They are noted here on the page that lists my previous works. In all three I refused to be partisan because I believe that stirring the pot by fighting old battles over again—or worse, taking sides—is counterproductive.

I started the drafts in 2003 of what became
An Irish Country Doctor
and quite frankly have been more comfortable since then working in my version of an Ireland where such political matters do not intrude and where in the works set in Ballybucklebo an ecumenical spirit prevails. Such a harmonious Ireland is my wish for the future of the entire country and has been reflected in my writing.

Readers of the Irish Country series may remember that in
Country Christmas
I alluded to the historical fact of the lowering of Catholic-Protestant barriers in 1941 following the Luftwaffe’s blitz of Belfast and Bangor. At that time, often in the country villages, evacuees and those bombed from their homes were taken in and cared for by strangers, regardless of the religious persuasion of either. In Ballybucklebo, the local priest and minister create a fictional tradition out of that real-life goodwill gesture of 1941. Since the separate Catholic and Protestant populations of chil
dren were too small to hold independent Christmas pageants, I
have the two denominations coming together for a communal service of thanksgiving at Christmastide. In doing so, I was, I believe, giving voice to my desire to see all Ireland at peace.

My enthusiasm for that also led me to another piece of wishful
thinking. I established the Ballybucklebo Bonnaughts Rugby
Football and Hurling Club. Such a thing would have been virtually impossible early in the twentieth century. The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), established in 1884 to preserve uniquely Irish sports such as hurling, camogie, and Irish football, frowned upon even mere attendance at a “foreign or garrison game” like rugby or soccer. Doing so could lead to expulsion from the association, so a
club combining Irish hurling and the English sport of rugby
would be unthinkable. I hope I will be forgiven by GAA purists, but in creating the Bonnaughts I was indulging, like Kinky Kincaid, in a little hopeful and, as it turned out, accurate foresight.

In 2005, the GAA temporarily relaxed its Rule 42, which prohibited
the playing of games other than those deemed to be traditionally Irish on their facilities. The home and headquarters of Gaelic sports,
Croke Park (Páirc an Chrócaigh)
known to local Dubliners as “Croker,” was thrown open to the Irish Rugby Football Union, whose facilities at Lansdowne Road, Dublin, were under reconstruction. The rugby team, even after the
partition of Ireland in 1922 (which divided Ireland into the south—now the Republic of Ireland—and Northern Ireland), had refused to acknowledge the border and selected players from the entire island. The team lost their first game in Croke Park to France in February 2007. The next, against England in March of that year, was awaited with some trepidation—and not only in regard to the athletic outcome on the
pitch. Happily, there were no incidents and to almost everyone’s delight Ireland beat England—by 43 to 13, which was the greatest victorious margin and the highest number of points ever scored by an Irish team against England since their first clash in 1875.

I watched on television that day in March 2007, and hearing the Irish crowd made up of those from both the north and the south
roar out as one, and singing a triumphant, joyous “Fields of Athenry”
gave me goose pimples and made the hair at the nape of my neck stand up. It also made me, an Ulsterman, proud to be Irish.

It is not to belittle the enormous efforts of all politicians on both sides of the border who strive to achive amity, but I couldn’t help think that it is also such measures of tolerance and mutual support at grass-roots level that break down old barriers. I saw the Croke Park experience as an event much like the exchange of Ping-Pong players in the ’70s between the United States and China, which paved the way for President Richard Nixon’s visit to the People’s Republic in 1972.

It has been my hope that in the first six Irish Country books I
have been painting in microcosm an Ireland that should be.

But before the recent cross-border comings together, Ireland, and particularly Northern Ireland, starting in 1969, had to suffer. And strangely enough that anguish was in part inadvertently provoked by people of enormous goodwill, the civil rights workers who sought a more just state there.

Irish performing artist Phil Coulter said in “The Town I Loved So Well,” a song about his childhood in Derry, Northern Ireland, “What’s done is done

… and what’s lost is lost and gone forever”—and should be. I decided that for the sake of the authenticity for which I constantly strive, tempers in Ireland had cooled enough to let some Irish politics intrude into
An Irish Country Wedding.

So I departed from my usual convention of skirting the sectarian question that has always been there like Banquo’s ghost. Yet during the writing of this novel, the president of the Republic of
Ireland, Mary McAleese (Máire Pádraigin Bean mHic Ghiolla
Íosa) is an Ulsterwoman from Belfast, and tempers have indeed cooled enough. A little reality, I decided, could surface.

While regular readers will, I trust, be pleased to meet the usual cast of eccentric characters (and, yes, Arthur Guinness still likes his Smithwick’s), and new readers will, I hope, find these folks amusing, I have for the first time allowed the doings of the nascent
Northern Ireland civil rights movement to play a more central role,
as would have been obvious to anyone living in Ulster at the time.

Perhaps what is true for life is also true for fiction. No matter how hard one may try to avoid it, reality will always intrude. In this case, I hope it increases your enjoyment of the work and adds to your understanding of my native land.

P
ATRICK
T
AYLOR
, 2011

Salt Spring Island

Canada