Dublin, 26.9.2025: Mellifluous Voice and Dublin's Fair City

Statue of Molly Malone by Jeanne Rynhart on Grafton Street, Dublin, photo by Wikimedia user Wilson44691

As we boarded our flight from Dublin to Chicago on the 26th, this happened:

We were in that long line that forms in a tunnel from the waiting room to the door of the plane, as people go through the plane door one by one, sometimes slowly, causing a line to form behind them.

Dublin, 25.9.2025: Tourist Tat and Famine Reminders

This is our transition day, the limbo day between, well, being in Ireland and going home. So we’ve taken it fairly easy and not pushed ourselves. I had read of a shopping center near Stephen’s Green that we hadn’t yet visited, so we walked there mid-morning, another pleasant sunny September morning. I enjoyed passing a row of brightly painted doors in Georgian townhouses that we’d passed before, and seeing them once again in the morning sunlight, bright yellows, reds, blues, pinks, greens beaming in the light.

Dublin, 24.9.2025: Oscar Wilde and Chicken and Ham Pie

Steve has gotten sick, just as he did when we went to Lisbon in December — a hacking cough, constant sneezing and sore throat, fever in the afternoon and evening yesterday. So we slept as long as we could this morning and when we got up with plans to go to the chapel at Dublin Castle so that I could see and photograph the carving of Brian Boru at the chapel entrance, he insisted we take a taxi.

Dublin, 23.9.2025: Grinning Faces and Ancestral Traces

One of many carved faces in doorways in the National Gallery of Ireland; Carlo Cambi was the artist who carved these.

(Writing on the 24th) As my previous entry notes, when we were in the National Library on the 22nd, I placed an order for three more Bessborough folders to be pulled for me on the morning of the 23rd, and on the 23rd, we returned to the library so that I could go through the folders. One of these was a set of payments to women for spinning and weaving flax for the Bessborough estate. I had known of the existence of these lists from something Jim Ryan published on his Ancestor Network website in the past. He had abstracted the names of the women paid for this work from the Bessborough papers and had noted which folder in the collection of Bessborough papers had this material.

Dublin, 22.9.2025: Old Manuscripts and Smithwick's Ale

The 22nd (I’m writing now in the 24th) was the day we’d set aside for a visit to the National Library, which is very close to The Mont, where we’re staying. I had made plans long in advance of the trip to go through the rent rolls and some of the other papers from the Bessborough estate of the Ponsonby family in County Kilkenny, from whom Ryan ancestors, in the earliest generation I can trace — John Ryan and wife Margaret Oates, both born, it seems, about 1785/1790 — rented land and for whom they perhaps did work. Using the library’s online website, I had ordered sixteen folders, eight for each of us, the maximum one can order in one day, to be pulled and waiting for me in the Manuscripts Reading Room at 9:30 A.M.

Dublin, 21.9.2025: Georgian Buildings and Psychics Sporting Red Bandanas

Today, our first full day in Dublin, dawned bright and sunny, and the sunshine held out through most of the day until intermittent showers — Irish weather — arrived in mid-afternoon. It was a gorgeous day to walk outside, so we left the hotel right after breakfast, a hearty and good breakfast in the restaurant inside The Mont Hotel, and walked to Trinity College to see the Book of the Kells.

Limerick, 19.9.2025: Piano Magic and Seafood Chowder

Friday, the 19th, was something of a rest day after the long day on the 18th. The website of Limerick’s Milk Market says that the place opens at 11 A.M. on Fridays and that there are food vendors, restaurants, and people selling this or that. But when we walked there, arriving about 11:30, the place was as dead as a doornail. There were people milling about — the area around the Milk Market seems to be a young folks’ hangout — but only a few tacky tourist-oriented shops and a bakery where we got a cup of cappuccino and a cinnamon roll.