Publishing is all about timing, and there is something prescient about this collection of essays, when our very existence seems under threat and the world feels perilously fragile, both environmentally and politically.
The Passenger: Ireland takes us along our jagged coastline, where the last remaining Irish-speaking communities are barely hanging on; beyond them, there are no more mackerel for Irish mouths in Irish waters. “I look at the pier in Dingle town and all I see are huge boats from Spain and Portugal landing their fish and send it straight off home,” says Seainin Mac Eoin, a fisherman from Kerry in Manchán Magan’s piece, An Ocean of Wisdom.
The late Lyra McKee, in her essay Ceasefire Babies, explores the staggering fact that more people have died by suicide in the North since the ceasefire than were killed in the conflict itself. Opposite this essay is a photograph of a mural with words from adult Lyra to her 14-year-old self: “It won’t always be like this. It’s going to get better.” All the more harrowing given that the journalist was subsequently killed by a bullet during rioting in Derry.
Throughout this fascinating collection of essays and photographs is a sense of pride and optimism in our significant progress. We are, as Catherine Dunne points out in her essay The Mass has Ended, the only country in the world to enshrine gay marriage in law through a referendum. We have a thriving economy finally free from the chains of the Catholic Church and from a time when abortion was illegal and “we all knew somebody who knew somebody, who knew somebody else who had travelled to England on ‘a shopping trip’. Or else we were that somebody else ourselves.”
These evocative, beautifully written essays and photo images are sometimes nostalgic but always clear-eyed, capturing perfectly our contradictory essence: a country that endured 30 years of civil conflict while supporting the same rugby team, whose war songs are cheerful and whose love songs are sad, and where, to quote Colum McCann, “we make great fun of despair”.
