A Trip to Ireland

In 2012 I finally went to Ireland. Most of my family and friends and even people I didn’t know all talked about what a wonderful place it was after they had been there. I am proud of my Irish heritage, but after being taught by Irish priests in high school and my experience of not being Irish enough for them, when I was in Europe Ireland wasn’t on my list of things I had to see. Finally in 2012 I went there for myself.  

As soon as I landed I was Irish enough.  I felt welcomed. It is an incredible country with incredible people. I have never been in a place where it was so easy to talk to people. Every town has a Falté shop, a government tourist center where the people are incredibly helpful. In Galway I got acclimated just walking around. I learned pizza shops in Ireland are always Pizza and Kebabs. I went to a poetry reading in a local library where arriving on time got me the last seat available.  It’s not cosmopolitan, it’s not provincial, it’s just comfortable.

In Dublin I toured the city particularly aware of the Easter Rebellion, the Post Office and the bullet holes in the Daniel O’Connell statue in the line of sight for British snipers at Trinity College to the to the Republicans General Post Office barricades. I attended a lecture at Dublin Castle and was invited by the moderator, an Italian Irish American from San Francisco professor at University College in Cork invited me to join him, the lecturers and their historian friends to go the pub.

I took a bus tour to the New Grange, a Neolithic site, even older than the Pyramids. I went to the National Museum of Ireland. I saw artifacts thousands of years old. It wasn’t the history I had shown at State Parks in California, someone else’s ancient history, it was mine going back to time immemorial, Irish stone tools and dugout canoes.

I went to the National Gallery and saw a special exhibit of Leonore Carrington, one of my favorite Mexican artists, an ex-pat of Irish ancestry who made Mexico her home. There was a wonderful docent who showed me around and we saw a small model maybe 8 inches long of “How Doth the Little Crocodile” a crocodile boat with a crocodile crew. I told the docent I had seen the full sculpture all 16 feet by 30 feet on the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City. It was an old friend from Mexico honored in Dublin, like me part of the Irish Diaspora.

I went on to Cashel in Tipperary to see where my family was from. In the graveyard of the Cathedral on Cashel Rock there was a Duggan gravestone. In Tipperary at Brian Boru’s castle I wasn’t a person with an Irish surname, I was one of the Duggans.

Ballingarry is a long and expensive cab ride from Cashel. I got there and walked the main street. There is the Church of the Assumption, two pubs, the Miners’ Rest and the Amby, and a sundries/post office shop. The pubs don’t serve meals. I asked the publican where do people eat in Ballingarry. He said at the Day Break across the street, a 7/11 type convenience store that served chicken wings and snacks.

People told me my cousin Mark Duggan, a veterinarian, was down the street, but he wasn’t home that day.

The only thing of note in Ballingarry was Famine Warhouse, actually 5 kilometers away in the country. Warhouse is where the Royal Irish Constabulary had fled from the Young Irelanders.  Young Ireland had taken over the Commons in the Rebellion in 1848 and the Constabulary sent to break it up had to flee for their lives and took five hostages in the widow McCormack’s farmhouse.   

An hours long gun battle ensued; two rebels were killed.  Reinforcements came for the Constabulary and the rebels retreated and faded into the countryside. Most of the Young Irelanders escaped capture after the event and some showed up in America afterwards. I knew about the Rebellion at Famine Warhouse, where the Irish Republican flag was first flown. I didn’t know it was in Ballingarry where my great great grandfather was from. It was closed for the Day.

I learned a little more about it and began to connect the dots. The Young Ireland movement was an independence minded group made of up of middle class Irish Protestants and Catholics. William Smith O’Brien, the leader was Protestant country gentleman from a landowning family and a member of Parliament.

Michael Duggan my great great grandfather arrived in Missouri in 1849 at the age of 21. He was not fleeing the famine, like Irishmen of the day in steerage to Ellis Island. He entered the United States through New Orleans and went up the Mississippi and bought 500 acres of prime farmland in Brinkstown Missouri.

A young man, 21 years old, from Ballingarry who left there in 1848/49 and arrived in America with enough money to buy a large farm. The Duggans have always been Republican in their sympathies and rebels at heart.

Was my great great grandfather a Young Irelander in Ballingarry in 1848? I don’t know. He certainly could have been.

91 Dead to date this year

On New Year’s Eve of the Lunar Year, a 72 year old madman from Hemet opened fire in a Monterey Park Dance Studio and Club and killed 10 New Year celebrants and wounded 10. He left and went to a similar Club in Alhambra where two patrons disarmed him. He fled and was spotted the next morning in Torrance. When the police approached his vehicle he shot himself and died.

The victims were apparently an older crowd that were celebrating the New Year at a party at the club where they took ballroom, latin and Chinese dance classes. What a sadness. The shooter was an old man who had reported to the Hemet Police where he lived that people were trying to poison him. The victims were also older people who belonged to a dance club. It’s remarkable that the shooter and the victims were all Asian, either Vietnamese or Chinese Americans.

And life goes on in America. Another mass shooting. A couple of weeks ago a whole family from a ten month old baby in their mother’s arms to grandparents were murdered in the Central Valley by gangsters. Eleven years ago a madman killed 7 people at Oikos University here in Oakland. A rare event in 1999 when the Columbine shootings occurred has now become commonplace, disturbed teenagers, madmen, paranoids, and politically deranged people are arming themselves and killing people en masse for all sorts of reasons, political, personal, jobs, race, gangs or sometimes for no discernible reason at all.

In a country of 330 million people these type of people are inevitable but only in America are we insane enough to make sure everyone who wants a weapon of nearly any kind can obtain it and to claim this as a constitutional right. With various loopholes, this includes violent felons and the insane. There are even court cases where the right to buy a gun for the disturbed or the mad is defended. A majority of Americans believe there should be limits but the gun manufacturers and their association the NRA fight common sense controls every step of the way.

Of course, almost all other countries control their citizens owning weapons very tightly. For myself single shot long rifles or shotguns for hunting or even protection are fine. But assault rifles, automatics, pistols, weapons meant only for killing people should be banned and gradually removed from circulation. It’s not going to happen in the United States for now and periodic mass murders like Monterey Park and worse should be expected frequently. There’s nothing rare about them now.

Reaching out to the isolated and deranged with decent mental health services wouldn’t hurt either.

Two days later another overwrought Chinese American man shot 7 coworkers to death in Half Moon Bay. The victims were farm workers at a mushroom farm. He was captured alive a short time later in a parking lot familiar to me from my Half Moon Bay days.

Monday a video was filming at the corner of MacArthur and Seminary at the gas station there, a few blocks from our house. Gunfire erupted and 1 person was shot dead and four people were wounded. It was multiple shooters and was apparently gang related.

91 people have died in mass shootings in the United States this month. This is according to a crowd sourced data base, Mass Shooting Tracker where four or more people shot defines a mass shooting.