Coreen

“There was a certain untamed energy about the west of Ireland – full of tragedy and struggle, sown with the flesh of the departed.”
― Rhian J. Martin

“Ireland is still what novelist Edna O'Brien calls a "pagan place." But that paganism does not conflict with a devout Catholicism that embraces and absorbs it, in a way that can seem mysterious, even heretical, elsewhere. In Ireland, Christianity arrived without lions and gladiators, survived without autos-da-fe and Inquisitions. The old ways were seamlessly bonded to the new, so that ancient rituals continued, ancient divinities became saints, ancient holy sites were maintained just as they had been for generations and generations.”
― Patricia Monaghan, The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit

“It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wife iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees.”
― Trish Deseine, Home: Recipes from Ireland

“She took the sea with her
Not beaches but the grey
relentless Irish sea,
its rhythm and the crying gulls.”
― Caroline Davies