Senator Andrew Bartlett
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
 
Carrickmacross, Inniskeen and Oldness
Over the weekend we got a good chance to get a sense of life in country Ireland, visiting a few different places in the vicinity of Carrickmacross. Mind you, it’s only an hour or so drive out of Dublin, so by Australian standards it’s hard to think of it as the country, but it certainly retains a rural, small town feel which is truly lovely.

I’m told the whole country is only about the size of Tasmania, with a population of 4-5 million, so it’s only natural that is has a different sense of space and place to Australia (which despite its large size is also far more urbanised that most other countries, including Ireland).

We visited a restored Workhouse, originally built in the 1840s. The Workhouses were where people and families went when they were completely destitute. They have an integral link with Australia, as many people went (or were sent) to Australia from around that period, which also coincided with an enormous famine. I am told that until the great famine, Ireland had a population of around 8 million and even today it has never recovered to anything like that level. Indeed, it’s only in very recent times that Ireland has had net positive migration.

As well as looking around the Workhouse, we got a good presentation from local historians. Of course, the local history involves some terrible oppression and atrocities on the part of the English, but I found it interesting to hear the people clearly have some obvious sensitivities about this, all this time later – wanting to be clear about the scale and nature of what happened, but not wanting to sound insulting towards the English. I’m told political relations between the UK and the Irish are as good as they have ever been, and everybody is hoping that the peace process in the north works out.

This County is one of the three that are in Ulster but not under London rule, and one of the local members was the sole Sinn Fein member in the Irish Parliament prior to the latest election, when an extra four were elected. We got to meet him, and three of the other local members at a dinner that night. Ireland has multi-member electorates, elected by direct proportional representation, which is a far more democratic system than Australia’s. However, it has been interesting to hear almost every political person I’ve met say that the biggest difficulty this presents is the competition this creates between members from the same party running and campaigning directly against each other. Politics seems to be very local here, and every day an elected member is in Dublin representing their seat in the Parliament is a day others are free to be on the ground working the electorate.

We also visited a tiny village called Inniskeen, birth place of the Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh, and heard something about his life and description of local life. On the way back to Dublin, we stopped at Newgrange, a world heritage site in the Boyne Valley. This is the site of a type of burial site called a passage grave, which is around 5 200 years old – one of the oldest built structures in the world.

Both Ireland and Turkey are full of old places and structures going back many hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. It is impressive to think of people and communities on the same land all that time ago, but it always make me wonder why we are so impervious to our own indigenous history in Australia. Because Aboriginal peoples were mainly hunter-gatherer communities who didn’t build stone towers and cities and walls (perhaps they weren’t being invaded from afar all the time), we can’t gaze on those sorts of structures. But examples of Aboriginal people inhabiting parts of Australia go back way longer than anything we’ve seen in Turkey or Ireland, and some of the people and cultures that are direct descendants still live amongst us in Australia today, yet we really don’t seem to have anything like the same ‘gee whiz’ attitude and wonderment about that as we do about old buildings and civilisations in Europe. Curious.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Wednesday, October 26, 2005 Permalink
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