Dublin: The Easter Uprising Tour and My Conversation with Kelan

I was early for the Easter, 1916 Uprising Tour in Dublin, finding the address and realizing it was a pub. Atfter using the loo, I took a seat at the bar, marveling that many were drinking Guinness at 11:00 a.m. I ordered a ginger ale that I didn’t particularly want. A boy and two young-ish grandparents approached. I asked if they’d like me to shift down a seat, so they could sit together, but the grandfather was leaving, they explained,  so it was just the boy and his grandmother.

“He loves history,” she explained, “So I thought he would enjoy the tour.”

“Me, too.”

“Are you from America?” the boy asked. He had short brown hair, big brown eyes, was wearing a football sweatshirt and brown track pants with trainers. I judged him to be about eleven, only a few inches shorter than I.

“I am,” I answered.

“What part?”

“Cleveland—it’s in Ohio.”

“The Cavaliers!” he announced, excited.

“Indeed,” I confirmed.

Did I know LeBron? Not personally.

“Were you mad when he left?” he asked. We were. We introduced ourselves.  Grandmother asked what I did, and when I answered that I was a headmistress, they seemed impressed. She had just retired, a special ed teacher.

“For primary kids,” Kelan added for my benefit.

After about ten minutes, we were herded into the pub's basement—mildew-smelling with a sticky floor—and our guide offered some back story, the cast of characters in Ireland's rebellions.  As people began to spill out onto the sidewalk for the actual tour, I found Kelan at the narrow door.

“He wanted to wait for you,” Grandmother explained.

“You’re the first real American I’ve ever spoken to,” Kelan told me as we walked toward Dublin Castle, admiring the bottle caps embedded like so many primary-colored polka dots in the cobblestones in Temple Bar—red, green, blue.

“And you’re the first Irish boy I’ve spoken to in Dublin,” I confirmed. We established that he had finished sixth grade, that he had gone to an amusement park the day before and recommended I add to my itinerary, that I had been to Disney World but did not care for the scary roller coaster rides he loved, that he would love to go there someday. He explained that he studied Irish at school, but when I asked if he could read a sign, he demurred: “I'm not so good yet. It doesn’t get really hard until secondary school.”

Huddled near a door where some revolutionaries had been tortured, we discussed our experiences on the London Eye. We agreed it wasn’t at all scary because it went so slowly.

Dublin is a low city, sans skyscrapers.  When the tour guide celebrated this fact, Kelan pointed out and then dismissed the Dublin spire as pretty dumb compared to other cities’ signature monuments.

“The Eiffel Tower, for example,” I suggested.

“Or The Tower of London or Big Ben, or the—you know—the tall one in New York,” he added. 

“The Empire State Building.”

“Right!”

When our guide gesticulated, full of anecdotes told out of chronological order, Kelan and I listened attentively. His grandmother made friends with an older New Yorker on the tour. I did not feel the need to reveal my own NYC roots, preferring to chat with Kelan. In the spaces between sites, we talked, peeling off layers of clothing as the sun grew warmer.  He tied his sweatshirt around his waist; I carried my jacket over my arm.

Kelan reported that he loved basketball, that he was one of four boys. We noted bullet holes in statues, jubilant when we pointed them out to one another. Our guide’s passion entertained us, and we admired him, even if we giggled a bit at his enthusiasm.  I said I thought England had been a mess about religion with Henry VIII and all those wives, but Ireland seemed much, much worse. Kelan agreed.

We learned that Frederick Douglass had spoken in Dublin. On the way home on a boat, a racist American had threatened to have Douglass removed from the ship until an Irishman interjected, saying to the ugly man: ”If there’s any swimming to be done on this trip, it’ll be you who will be doing it.” Kelan and I pumped our fists, celebrating Irish heroism. We saw the Statue of Justice, her back to the people, learned of starvation and poverty, heard about plans gone awry, messages undelivered, ships full of ammunition sunk, and a fighting spirit that could not be dimmed. We imagined ourselves part of a fierce and failed rebellion as we gazed at the statue of Big Jim Larkin.

At the post office, our final stop, the tour guide, exhorted us always to break all the windows if we found ourselves in a siege and told, us, too, that history doesn’t always remember the winners; in Ireland, it is the patriots who are remembered for their resilience and determination to achieve independence. 

Suddenly the tour was over. Kelan and his Gran were off to meet his grandfather. We didn’t think to exchange names or emails. We walked off in separate directions.

Perhaps we aren't supposed to hang on to some experiences--we have them and let them go, balloons up into the sky.

But the next morning, before I left Dublin, I found myself in Dubray’s, searching the Young Adult shelves for The Guns of Easter.

“It’s the best book I’ve ever read,” Kelan confided, “You’ve got to read it.”

There was one copy on the shelf. I bought it and read it on the drive to Dingle.