My wife, Mary Kay, and I first heard about Mick Moloney's Irish Folklore Tours shortly after he started offering them in the early 1990s. We were well acquainted with Mick's work as an instrumentalist, singer, producer, scholar, album note writer and tireless promoter of Irish Traditional Music.
It seemed that if anyone could be depended upon to show us the real Ireland, literally without the Blarney so often found on the packaged tours, it would be Mick. For a variety of reasons, we were unable to take immediate advantage of this opportunity. Finally, in 1995 we decided that we could wait no longer.

We were now faced with the decision as to which of the eight tours being offered that year would be graced by our presence. This one turned out to be fairly simple once we noticed that the wonderful fiddler, Eugene O'Donnell, would be along throughout the summer's final tour, in mid September. A native of Derry, where he had established a formidable reputation both as an instrumentalist and as a dancer, Eugene had emigrated to Philadelphia in the 1950s. We had seen him in concert many times, usually with Mick, and had been struck by his gentle manner, his formal attire and, of course, his matchless renditions of Ireland's lovely slow airs. Now he had retired and, after almost forty years in the United States, was returning to Derry. Two legends for the price of one.

Apparently Eugene's presence had been influential with others as well, since there were almost forty people on the tour. I was a little concerned about this but I needn't have been. It was a great group, ranging in age from the early 20s to 70 something. As a retired high school principal from New York said, "I like this group because its not just old people." And not just young or middle aged ones either. In real life, we were health professionals and poets, writers and lawyers, students and computer specialists, a retired priest and a retired truck driver. Most of us were Americans, but there was one Australian woman and one Swiss woman. Some were regular participants or listeners in traditional music sessions back home, while others - from areas less influenced by the Irish diaspora - were grateful for the chance to mention names like Kevin Burke and Paddy Keenan without drawing blank stares in return. We each had our own reasons for being there, but the common thread was a deep interest in the music, history and culture of Ireland - and especially its land and its people.

Mick was there to greet us at Shannon Airport, along with his cousin - and general factotum - Deirdre Cronin. Eugene was there too, as was our bus driver, Willie Ryan from Limerick. I guess Willie was the person most affected by our larger than average group, since it meant negotiating a larger vehicle in and out of the nearly inaccessible spots where the ancient Celts had, somewhat inconsiderately, left their most interesting sites. He managed to do this without losing any bus parts, or his good humor, drawing several well deserved rounds of applause in the process. Willie's sister, Moira Treacy, joined us along the way.

The trip almost started out on a sour note when two of our group did not show up at Shannon. Mick was quite concerned, murmuring that this had never happened before in the several years he had been leading his tours. Fortunately, they joined us in Clifden that night in time for dinner, with a tale of an emergency landing in Denver, an unplanned trip to London/Heathrow and a multimodal journey across Clare and Galway.

Briefly, the itinerary was Dysart High Cross in Clare, Clifden/Connemara, an Aran Island (Inishmore), Kylemore Abbey, Westport, Sligo, Donegal (too briefly), Derry, the Antrim coast (Giants Causeway, Glens of Antrim), Belfast, Kilkeel (in County Down), Armagh, Navan Fort, Monasterboice (where we had our group pictures taken in a steady rain - generally though, the weather was beautiful), Newgrange, and Dublin. Here are a few of the highlights.

On the second day of the tour, after a night in Clifden, we drove through the starkly beautiful Connemara landscape to Rossaveel, on Galway Bay. This is the jumping off place for Inishmore, largest of the Aran Islands. Our guide, along with Mick, was Michael Gibbons, a highly knowledgeable, enthusiastic and approachable archeologist who had returned to his native Connemara after working in the Middle East. After a bracing boat ride of about 45 minutes, we arrived at Kilronan, the largest community on the island. From there, it was a brief, but harrowing jitney ride, to a spot a mile or so from Dun Aengus, on narrow roads lined with stone walls and filled with hikers and bicyclists. Dun Aengus is a pre-historic ruin perched three hundred feet above the water. It was probably a fort, but may also have served as a theater and perhaps as a site for religious ceremonies. I don't have any mystical ruminations to insert here about establishing contact with the ancient people who lived or fought or worshiped there, but I know I'll never forget standing on that windy plain,under a bright blue sky with fluffy white clouds, looking over the flat, rocky island and the Clare coast beyond.

We liked Sligo a lot. It's not especially picturesque or quaint, but it has a wonderful vitality to it Our local guide was Martin Enright, a school teacher, Yeats scholar and archeology expert. (Are all the Irish so knowledgeable in so many diverse areas, or is it just Mick's friends?) Martin took us to several points of interest in the Sligo area, including Carrowmore, with its large collection of megalithic tombs, Kilvarnet (memorable, perhaps, only to those of us who have memorized Yeats' poem, "The Fiddler of Dooney), and Lough Gill. What I remember most about Sligo, though, is the music. This is appropriate for an area of Ireland which has produced Michael Coleman and so many other brilliant traditional players.
The Fiddler of Dooney Festival and competition was under way while we were there and we had the opportunity to hear the promising future of Irish traditional music in the capable hands of several young Donnchas, Endas and Maireads. We also got to hear Mick in concert with Brendan McGlinchey, an excellent fiddler who had only recently begun playing again after a hiatus of several years. Best of all though, were the sessions back at the hotel which lasted well into the night.

Before leaving Sligo the next morning, several of us visited the workshop of Michael Quick, a woodcarver who graciously made samples of his work for each of us, while regaling us with tales of Ireland's ancient past. We stopped at Yeats' grave in the churchyard at Drumcliff, "under bare Ben Bulben's head" and, further along the Donegal road, we visited the Creevykeel Court Tomb. This site is at least 5000 years old and perhaps as much as 7000, making it one of the oldest in Europe. It was here that Mick told us the story of the farmer whose land surrounded another ancient site. One day, some tourists asked the farmer how old the ruins were. "4,027 years" was his response. They asked him how he could give such a precise answer. "Well", he said, "an archeologist once told me that the place was 4,000 years old, and that was 27 years ago."

We crossed into Northern Ireland at Strabane and the change was apparent almost immediately. There was the heavily fortified border crossing checkpoint of course, which we sailed right through in those cautiously optimistic times, but there were also the red, white and blue curbs (make that "kerbs") in some of the communities we passed through, proclaiming the local residents' allegiance to the British Crown. Derry is a beautiful and historic city, with too much of that history, of the wrong sort, having been made in recent years. Eugene told me of growing up there in the 1940s and of not being able to vote until he had emigrated to Philadelphia. We met the current Mayor of Derry, who serenaded us in the Guild Hall while wearing the medieval medals associated with his office. Even the politicians are musical over there. We also met the "King of Derry", Paddy Doherty, who, for several years has run a program by which unemployed young people - Catholic and Protestant - are taught construction skills and set to work rehabilitating buildings around the city. As his title suggests, he is widely respected in both communities and qualifies as one of Ulster's true heroes. We walked along the city walls, overlooking the Catholic Bogside neighborhood with its militant murals announcing a "Free Derry". Mary Kay noticed a particularly interesting looking church and asked Eugene its name. He solemnly informed her that it was St. Eugene's. We had known him long enough by then to be slightly skeptical about this response, but subsequent research confirmed that that was indeed its name.

We reached Belfast after a day's ride along Ireland's northern coast, highlighted by the Giant's Causeway and the gorgeous Glens of Antrim. The cease fire in the North seemed to be holding fast at the time of our trip, thus allowing something Mick said would have been impossible, or at least highly inadvisable, only months before - a trip up the Shankill Road, heart of the city's Loyalist community, on a bus with license plates from the Republic. We met with a local community worker whose message was essentially that until the violence ended, there could be no progress. After a brief ride through the community, we drove to the neighboring Falls Road, a Nationalist area. We were offered tea and cookies at a local community center and had the opportunity to speak with local residents. One morning spent in a milieu as complex and subtle as working class Belfast hardly makes me an expert in anything, but I came away feeling less encouraged about the prospects for peace and justice than I had when we left Paddy Doherty's Derry. Like him, the people we spoke to in Belfast were filled with good will but I had the sense that they were talking past each other. Not a criticism certainly, just a reminder to myself that centuries of injustice and violence are bound to leave a legacy of misunderstanding and mistrust that will be overcome only through the persistence, intelligence and courage that Northern Ireland miraculously continues to produce. On our way back down the Falls Road, we stopped opposite the cemetery in which the IRA hunger strikers are buried. When I mentioned to one of our group that I had gotten a pretty good picture of the heavily fortified Royal Ulster Constabulary station across the street, he replied that "they probably got an even better one of you." Something completely different in the afternoon - a visit to the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. Two museums, actually. We didn't have much opportunity to explore the Transport exhibits, but the Folk Museum was outstanding. It consists primarily of several dwellings and other buildings, originally scattered throughout Ulster, which had been moved to a 100 plus acre site east of Belfast and faithfully reconstructed. There is a small village, but many of the houses are distributed around the Museum grounds, out of sight from each other. Visitors can get the feeling of walking through the Irish countryside, stopping at various houses along the way where the Museum staff are available to discuss the everyday lives of the original residents.
There was much more of course - the modest but eloquent Famine memorial overlooking a windswept lake in remote Mayo; the historic city of Armagh and its prehistoric neighbor, the Navan Hill Fort; concerts almost every night by Mick and Eugene; the delightful County Down storyteller, John Campbell; etc., etc. The tour ended in Dublin, with the famed street ballad singer, Frank Harte joining Mick and Eugene in concert. Appropriately enough, the final song that evening was "The Parting Glass" which captured perfectly my feelings of regret that the whole experience was coming to an end, exceeded by gratitude that we had been able to enjoy it in the first place.