Our first full day on the bus tour started with a proper Irish breakfast, which I could (and would, after a week of it) get used to: plenty of bacon (British bacon, or I guess Irish too, my favourite!). Afterwards we continued southwest for New Ross, where we stopped for a visit on a “famine ship” called Dunbrody https://www.dunbrody.com/. The ship is a reproduction of an 1840s emigrant ship and tours offer a window into the emigrant experience following the Irish potato famine aka the “Great Hunger” of 1845-1849 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland), when many Irish people left for the United States, Canada and other destinations abroad. At the time, potato blight meant that the main food sources for Irish families disappeared (various sources noted that Irish were eating between 15-40 potatoes per day!).
On the Dunbrody, each visitor was given an identity as a passenger, and a guide and costumed interpreters acted the parts of other passengers, giving a personality to people who sailed on the ship both in steerage and first class. I was a single mother travelling with her infant son.
It’s interesting to visit from a country that the Irish emigrated to (Canada was a major destination). In Canada, the focus is on the immigration narrative, i.e. how hard it is to start the life in the new country. Here the focus is on the experience of leaving, the unknown, and the forces that push rather than the forces that pull. More than once we would read about emigrants throwing a party that they termed as a “wake” saying goodbye to their old lives. Particularly heartbreaking in this time was the extreme poverty of the 1840s famine and the news that so many died on route. The ships were often called coffin ships because the death rate was up to 50 percent.
Afterwards lunch took a lighter note as we visited a country pub called Marine Bar http://marinebar.ie/, where we had soup and sandwiches and listened to owner Christy O’Neill play familiar Irish songs like Whiskey in the Jar, The Wild Rover, Molly Malone, and Danny Boy. We’d continue to hear these standards over again throughout our journeys to more pubs. They do get in your head.
Following our lunch stop, we arrived in Cork and looked around the city. Since it was a Sunday, many stores were closed, but a shopping district provided some familiar names (hello Marks and Spencer https://www.marksandspencer.com/ and my new favourite euro-store Flying Tiger – originating in Copenhagen, Denmark, this needs to come to Canada https://flyingtiger.com)
Later on our own Mom and I stopped into a pub offering a deal for pints and wings and listened to some more Irish music. Hello again Whiskey in the Jar and Wild Rover. By now we’d also learned the Irish term Craic, pronounced crack (to the delight of the Irish who kept reminding us, no, not that type of crack you crazy North Americans) and meaning “fun” – so it was a bit of that as well to end the day.