"I am not young enough to know everything." ~ Oscar Wilde

Let me say a few words about breakfast in Irish hotels.  I can't speak for the Irish in general, but I hope I do when I say they really know how to do up breakfast.

I'll start with the brown bread, ubiquitous and universally

delicious.  Irish butter is known for it's quality and is exported all over the world.  But breakfast doesn't stop there.  A "full Irish" breakfast consists of eggs, toast, fried potatoes, broiled tomatoes, breakfast sausage, black pudding (a type of pork blood sausage usually made with a high proportion of oatmeal), white pudding (no blood, but pork meat, suet, bread and oatmeal), rashers of bacon and possibly sautéed mushrooms and baked beans.  You won't need to eat again for the rest of the day. (My theory of eating while traveling is this: eat all the bread, butter, cheese and bacon you can lay your hands on.  Since we already found the vegetables in Dublin, we were golden.  You wash out fat with veggies and fiber, right?  Just mix it up a little! And walk, walk, walk!)

Well, one or two Full Irish go a long way.  The cornucopia of Irish hotel breakfast only starts there.  The groaning boards held a variety of scones, teacakes, breads and pastries with every variety of jams and preserves (blackberry was my fave), plain and flavored yogurt with muesli, groats, pepitas, (yes!) sunflower seeds, walnuts, raisins, fresh blue-, black- and raspberries, cold salamis, local cheeses, fish and on and on.  One hotel breakfast spread was more eye-popping than the next.  And on top of this, anything you might want from the kitchen was included.  We both thought sadly of the hotel breakfast bars in our future here at home with watery scrambled eggs, unripe melons, day-old bagels, uninspired cereals.  Oh, well, at least they usually have piles of bacon.

So here's our dining room at the Mont Clare with some selections from the board plus a kitchen order of smoked salmon, eggs and 'boxty potatoes'.  That would be riced and fried in the shape of a box.

I've already talked too much about breakfast.  Next on the agenda was a haircut for my sister who is always slightly edgy because she thinks her hair may be too long.  We set out and found Natasha from Russia who did an amazing job and had us laughing the whole time  She had some fairly hair-raising stories about health care costs in Ireland, so we felt right at home.

We decided to try one of the hop on, hop off tour buses to see some of the sights.  These fun rides are double deckers, with the top lever open air.  We passed a lot of beautiful Georgian houses, crowded streets of shops, banks, the houses of parliament called The Oireachtas, churches and cathedrals, the Guinness brewery.

KILMAINHAM GAOL

 

Now must be the time to say that reminders of the suppression and oppression of Ireland and her people are inescapable.  The depredations of one power after another, Picts, Celts, Vikings, Normans, the Catholic Church, the English forever pillaging and plundering the ordinary citizens will curl your hair.  This is not to say that other periods of migration, Stone, Copper and Bronze Ages, Dark and Middle Ages, the Age of Discovery, the Reformation, Industrial Revolution and World Wars were not scourges on the populations of the world.  But in Ireland all this history is very close at hand and seems to reveal itself at every turn.

 

Kilmainham Gaol, one of the Dublin landmarks most associated with misery and squalor, was built in 1796 to replace a worse edifice dating from 1300.  Men, women and children were held, often many in one cell, along with prisoners from the rebellions of 1798, 1803, 1848, 1867, 1916 and 1923.  Many died of disease, many were hanged and many sent to Botany Bay, but during the Great Famine many committed crimes in order to be housed in the jail and receive at least one meal a day.  One of the guides told us the serpents in the sculpture over the entrance symbolized "evil in chains".

Fifteen Republican prisoners of the 1916 Easter Rising were executed by firing squad in the courtyard and Kilmainham was finally decommissioned as a prison in 1924.  It was left to fall into ruin until 1960 when the Kilmainham Jail Restoration Society set about clearing the overgrown vegetation, trees, fallen masonry and bird droppings from the site. By 1962 the symbolically important prison yard where the leaders of the 1916 rising were executed had been cleared of rubble and weeds and the restoration of the Victorian section of the prison was nearing completion.  The final restoration of the site was completed in 1971 when Kilmainham Gaol chapel was re-opened to the public.  It now houses a museum on the history of Irish nationalism and offers guided tours of the building. An art gallery on the top floor exhibits paintings, sculptures and jewelry of prisoners incarcerated in prisons all over Ireland.

I don't mean to gloss over Irish history which is both inspirational and horrifying.  I plan to read more about it and I hope you will, too.  Alas, I have to save Oscar Wilde for my next post.