For 19 days in 2023, from July 28 to Aug. 15, we made our first trip to Ireland, picking up a car in Dublin (after staying in the city for three days) and driving around the perimeter of the island, also spending time in Derry and Belfast in Northern Ireland, and ending in Trim, just outside of Dublin. It was a grand trip, and we did all the Irish things visitors do: the pubs, the pub crawl with musicians, visiting every ruined abbey, castle and church, traversing the Giant’s Causeway and the Gobbins, the Game of Thrones tour, more pubs and “trad” music, oohing over the 40 shades of green, bicycling on Inishmore, the Irish Rebellion walking tour (lots of rebellion stuff in Dublin), having our faces lashed by the Atlantic on the Dingle peninsula, many sips of many different whiskeys. It was a packed-to-the-gills trip, which we reprised between Boxing Day and New’s Year with a visit back to Trim and Dublin (to experience the island when it wasn’t deploying its best weather). It is hard to say, exactly, what feeling “Irish” meant during our time there, though we would have said that that was what we felt because of the Guinness and the countryside and lovely accents (even in Belfast) and the EPIC museum saga of migration and return, and a generally vague but comforting feeling of being “in touch” with something ancient and elemental and, if not timeless, at least timelong and tested, holy and romantic, as O’Toole names it. Then I read Fintan O’Toole’s excellent We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland. He uses the timeframe of his own life, from his birth in 1958 to the declawing of the Celtic Tiger in the late aughts, to discuss what he sees as the Irish habit, formed over centuries, of willful not-knowing to keep things calm and unchanged (even when that wreaks havoc and destruction). He explores, for instance, how everybody knew about the absolutely rapacious way children were treated by the government (through the workhouses and reform schools) and the Church (through the laundries and sexual abuse), yet did nothing to reform anything, preferring to keep things quiet so that the state and Church could maintain their powers (and thus keep “holy and romantic” society stable). If something did boil to the surface, such was the training in subservience that it was thought insulting and impolite to bother the priests about their corruptions: with that kind of attitude, the suffering of children lost out to a noxious decorum. The Troubles figure in as well, a separate but related exercise in viciousness and barbarity, where the IRA and their fellow travelers deployed myths about Irish rebelliousness to blow people up. (The Protestants had their own version of this as well.) I’ve read bits and pieces about the long war on the island, but O’Toole brings home just how savage it was—not even really a war but a series of vandalisms designed to maim and murder, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” This was an Irishness that two Americans on holiday did not see, could not see, since it was not an Irish that Ireland would want us to see, preferring that we drink our Smithwicks and tap our feet to fiddle, banjo and the pipes and rhapsodize about the greenery and stand in awe at the entrance of Newgrange and feel the force fields on the Hill of Tara. Which we were quite willing to do, and did, with great joy. But O’Toole’s book shows that the travelers’ Irish is a skim coat over the deeper Irish, which has its many darknesses and defaults and is not so nearly attractive. Which is also to say that this is the condition of any society these days and not necessarily a reason for disillusion or rejection: being corrected is not a betrayal. But I do have to say that finishing the book did temper my initial impulse to want to pull up stakes and move to the emerald isle, which was a good thing because, after all, for how long could we live in the traveler’s Ireland before it dissolved and we were left to face the face that the dissolution exposed? Not for long at all. Will we go back? Of course we will. Much we have not seen and want to see, and we’ve made connections with people that we want to nourish (both the connections and the people). But O’Toole reminds me—again—how easy it is to let our enthusiasms drive our judgments and how important it is to cultivate the habit of standing corrected without being disillusioned so that one can take in the fullness of a place and enjoy a fullness of response. That is the best gift given by traveling: balanced eyes, large heart.