Ireland, a Bicycle, and a Tin Whistle

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

After cycling around Ireland in search of traditional music and a sense
of Irish life as it is currently being lived, David Wilson, an assistant
professor of Celtic studies at the University of Toronto who has written
widely on Irish history and politics, can spin a yarn with the best of
the locals.

Wilson was born in Northern Ireland, in a Protestant part of Whitehead
near Islandmagee, and started his journey there. From Whitehead south
through Dublin to Cape Clear, then northwest through Counties Kerry,
Clare, and Mayo to Belfast, he traveled across wild open fields and
visited crowded pubs and festivals, where dancing continues till
dawn—as does the telling of tales.

Thoroughly at home with the locals—“Being on a bicycle gives you a
chance of working off the calories and maintaining some kind of
equilibrium between the pints consumed and the miles travelled”—he
makes light of religious animosity yet cannot escape from it: “It
becomes difficult to imagine a world without Protestants and Catholics,
Unionists and Nationalists, us and them.” He seeks refuge in
agnosticism, only to find it dismissed as a cowardly form of evasion,
the worst of all possible worlds. He notes that religious confusion is
rife in Canada too, and goes on to a hilarious description of an Orange
Parade in the Ottawa Valley when he was a boy.

Ireland, a Bicycle, and a Tin Whistle is a comic travelogue that takes
its pace and pattern from an evening of Irish music, where a fast reel
follows a sad one.