spring

Tue

10°C | 7°C

I am sitting at my desk in the West of Ireland, just a wave away from New York.

It is Spring apparently but I don’t see any flowers attempting to brave the chill

and the financial climate is no brighter…you know all about that.

So here is something guaranteed to cheer you up,

part of a culture that can never be accused of lack of colour-
an Irish traveller wedding in Dublin.

Who needs daffodils?

Spring will also bring the Burren to life, my favourite place in the world.

The limestone hills sit like brooding hens along the Atlantic coast.

Wonderful, rare flowers will bloom in the crevices of the desolate moonscape

with the perseverance of the young traveller girls baring flesh in the

bone-cutting westerly breezes.

But there is an old saying…… ‘you can’t eat scenery.’

We are losing 1500 people a week and I can feel the pain of their broken hearted

mothers across the country as they pack their bags.

My 16 yr old boy, my 6ft 2 pride and joy, came to take his clothes on Friday.

I blamed a sad documentary on the TV as tears streamed down my face later that evening.

Childhood over, no more thump, thump, thump as the slither hits off the side of the house,

practising hurling every day for the past ten years.
How it drove us mad that thump, thump, thump.

We roared ‘would you ever stop?’ And if it stopped for a minute
it was nearly worse because you didn’t know when to expect the next thump
and your nerves would be wrecked.

But what I would give to hear it again.

He isn’t going abroad, he is only moving half an hour away with the innocent notion of a career

‘riding horses’ and the total incomprehension of the naivety of his decision to quit
school the year before his leaving cert.
As the method actors who access their painful life moments to portray emotion,

I can easily put myself in the place of all the other mothers who are crying and

whose young people may decide to stay where life is easier and home will become

a quick holiday once a year.

So that is the way it is here, still beautiful, still colourful, we are still laughing,

still playing music, Spring will come and we will leave a light on in the window.