The Pull Of Ireland: Ties That Bind

Last fall and then much of this past winter I spent in my house here writing and rewriting and then editing a novel set in East Hampton and to be published this spring. It begins with these words:

"Here, if anywhere in America, you could still find the sweet life . . . "

I love East Hampton and I meant those words. And in casting about for ways to illustrate why this was so and how special and lovely a place this is, I began by describing the road on which I live and which plays a central part in the story. I tried to explain what makes it different and then to compare it to far-off places of equivalent beauty. Here was how I reached for the words:

"Further Lane is only two miles long but offers bonus glimpses of the Atlantic as it ambles parallel to the ocean across rich men's lawns and working corn fields and slim groves. Green farms, blue waters and crashing surf; you might well be in Mayo or elsewhere on the west coast of Ireland. . ."

My mother's parents were both born there, in Ireland, my grandmother in Mayo itself outside a town called Castlebar. On a farm, I guess. Their name was Kennedy. She married a man named Winston, also Irish, after both had immigrated to New York.

My father's parents were American-born, but also of Irish extraction.

I was living and working in London as a correspondent in 1959 or '60 when I first saw Ireland and then it was the North. The British Government was providing tax breaks and other benefits to U.S. companies that would open plants there and create jobs for the chronically depressed North, and I flew over to a place called Coleraine to have a look and file a story.

That was an Ireland that was foreign to me. Like smooth water with a bad undertow flowing beneath, uneasy-making, disturbing.

There was no fighting then and the countryside was green and lovely and the little towns we drove through quaint and placid. But sad. You couldn't miss seeing the men standing there on the sidewalks, looking up to see us pass and then looking down again, men leaning against old walls smoking and, I suppose, waiting for the pubs to open. They were men in worn suits and cloth caps, skinny, small men most of them, with the dole money and nothing more, sufficient for a pack of smokes and a pint of lager or a stout.

There were no jobs for those men; that was the trouble and the root of the troubles to come. There were men in those little towns and in the cities like Belfast who grew up, lived their adult lives, and grew old and died without ever having held steady work.

That's why they wanted the Yanks there. Not that they loved us but that we might come in and open plants and mills and hang out the "help wanted" signs.

I make no claim of seeing into tomorrow. But it would have taken a fool not to have seen the awful tomorrows that eventually came.

A couple of years later, an entirely different Irish experience.

We were living in Paris with two small children born there and we flew in an old high-wing Fokker from Le Bourget to Dublin on holiday.

There were poor people and the unemployed there, too, of course. But there was a healthy bustle about Dublin I hadn't seen in the North. The streets were busy with cars and trams and bicycles and through the portals of Trinity College and onto the green courts within, hurried the students and the dons, and the theaters were booming with queues for tickets at both the Abbey and the Gate, and shop girls and stenos and young men from the ad agencies and the banks and offices took lunch on a nice day sprawled on the grass of Saint Stephen's Green at the top of Grafton Street. We had a couple of rooms in the Russell that looked out onto the Green.

And we went out to Phoenix Park to the zoo, where brazen monkeys capered and chattered and our daughters capered and chattered back in delight and we rented a car and drove out from the city along the sea, following lanes so slow and sleepy, sheep blocked the road, and you sat there and waited for the shepherd to finish his smoke, and to chivvy the sheep on their way so we could pass.

That Ireland was better.

Here in New York and in the Hamptons we have our professional Irish who go on and on, the usual blather about the Old Country, so splendid a place you wonder why they don't pull up stakes and go back. You have the fierce golfers who sign up for elaborate tours, six Irish courses in seven days. And the suckers who put up cash to finance the bomb-throwers of the I.R.A. And the Irish who cannot watch a rerun of "The Quiet Man" without a bout of weeping, and bad imitations of "Squire Danaher" and Barry Fitzgerald and of "Himself," John Wayne as Soldier Thornton, the Irish-American everyman finally gone home to the whitewashed cottages of the past.

For a place like East Hampton, so inexorably linked to the WASP establishment and to England (wasn't it crusty Puritans from Maidstone, England, who came via the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1640, who founded this town?), there is here an odd pull toward Ireland. Maybe it's Montauk that does that, our local equivalent of a Land's End, beyond which there is only 3,000 miles of ocean . . . and the Old Country.

Or maybe it's those delightful summer kids who arrive mysteriously from Ireland each year when the season begins, drawn by the bucks and the adventure of America and the summer sun, and they find jobs in the motels and bars and restaurants, and party now and then, before going back in the fall for another year of college. Or their first real, grownup jobs. In either case, sunburned and full of wide-eyed tales. They are temporaries here, those Irish, but welcome. Nice kids, most of them, and when they show up, you know it's summer.

I've been back a half dozen times myself, usually to write, some assignment or other, some brief and outrageous junket more likely. Yet I'm never drawn to stay.

A few years back, I traveled about Ireland for a week, from Shannon to Dublin, and then back south again on a wonderful train, to embark from Cobh aboard QE2 for New York. In the old days, Cunard and the other steamship lines called regularly there. But not during the recent "troubles," not with the bombings, and a ship like QE2 such a marvelous and tempting target.

But now, after perhaps 15 or 20 years, there she was, a mile or two offshore at dawn, waiting for the lighters to take us out through the shallows to the channel and the great ship, while all around us that morning were these hundreds and hundreds of Irish sailboats and motorboats and small yachts and fishing craft and ferries and horns and shouts and waved flags: a lot of Irishmen and Irishwomen cheering a British ship bound for America.

How it must have been 100 years ago, if slightly less glamorous, when my own people first crossed. . .

James Brady is a weekly columnist for Advertising Age and for Parade magazine. His new novel, "Further Lane," will be published June 1 by St. Martin's Press.