On a stunning morning in lovely Cobh, the departure point for some storied disasters--most notably the Titanic, but also the coffin ships aboard which so many Irish perished as they fled from the murdering famine--I am sitting in the lovely reception room of the historic Commodore Hotel, trying to figure out how to write the sound of the way my friend's cousin Pat pronounced but. Not simply but, more bhut or bhuht, except those spellings don't convey the breathy conjunction she emitted so often as she talked and talked about Irish politics, about Mikey and Michael D and the crime of homelessness and how Sinn Fein freely criticizes the sitting coalition government, "bhuht" has no real ideas of its own to offer.
Aside from the music of her speech, it could have been any of us talking about local politics anywhere.
On my first visit to Ireland, decades ago, a fellow named Seamus O'Cinnaidé, who wrote in Irish for the Irish Times, told me that the Irish don't care if a story is true as long as it's a good one. But times change…
Continue reading at…https://burnsmar.blogspot.com/2018/10/vancouver-to-dublin.html