A Semester in Ireland

By Glynn Baugher

This book presents a light-hearted view of Ireland and the Irish people that the author encountered, especially of college life. The beautiful landscapes of Ireland, the lovely gardens, and behavioral eccentricities are featured. Lavishly illustrated with the author’s own photographs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781532092374

Glynn Baugher

Glynn Baugher grew up in rural Virginia; graduated from William Monroe High School; earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Emory and Henry College; earned his Master of Arts degree and Ph. D. from Tulane University. While teaching at the college level for thirty-four years, Glynn married and fathered three children. Today he is retired and lives in Emory, Virginia.

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Copyright © 2020 Glynn Baugher.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-9236-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-9237-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020900454

iUniverse rev. date: 01/11/2020

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CONTENTS

Dedication

Preface

A Semester in Ireland

DEDICATION

I dedicate this book to all of the Americans who came to visit me in Ireland: Mae, my wife; my three children—April, Dawn, and Eric, April staying with me months, just having completed her doctorate in physics; my future sons-in-law, Jon Goetz and Dan Agostini; Jackie Snelson; Eric’s college friend Chris Saah, with his grandfather’s Leica; and my colleague Zita McShane and her daughter Kathleen.

I dedicate the book also to the 22 Frostburg State University students who made the trip with me, and to the two University of Maryland, College Park students who traveled with our group.

To George White, Frostburg State geography professor there at the same time.

To Joan Serafin at FSU and Liam Irwin at Mary Immaculate, coordinators of the exchange.

PREFACE

In 1997 I participated in an exchange program of faculty and students from Frostburg State University, Frostburg, Maryland, and Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland. I taught the spring semester and stayed several extra weeks, teaching both the Americans who traveled with me and Mary Immaculate students, teaching three courses and spending as much time as I could traveling about Ireland in my hired car. The following is essentially my journal of that experience, with very little added, just an occasional explanation or elaboration.

All of the pictures in this book are from slides that I took when in Ireland. The cover photo was taken in the Gap of Dunloe, Killarney. My son, Eric, contemplates the beauty.

A Semester in Ireland

We got to Shannon, finally, shortly before noon February 16, the other sixteen students having arrived, as originally planned, at about 7 a.m. the 15th. Aer Lingus claimed that US Air did not get any of the names into US Air’s computer system. US Air started out blaming Aer Lingus. Clearly, the trouble was with the airlines, perhaps both. I tended to side with Aer Lingus until I dealt with them directly. US Air, with the help of Megan Ferguson’s dad, who wrote part of their computer program, got the 16 students onto a flight leaving about 2:20, so they got to Boston in plenty of time to leave for Shannon on the 8 p.m. flight. Six of the students, rather late arriving at the airport, were not able to get checked for the 2:20 flight, so of course I stayed with them. The original flight from BWI was delayed in New Orleans for 2 ½ hours due to, I think, severe winds.

When our flight arrived in Boston, we were delayed in a holding pattern for a long time, landing there about 45 minutes too late to catch the Aer Lingus flight to Ireland. At the Aer Lingus terminal, completely at the other end of Logan, they had turned off the lights by 9. We rousted a couple of them from the back den, getting a not impolite but perfunctory It’s US Air’s problem. We hauled our carry-ons back to US Air, a madhouse (perhaps increased by American Airlines’s threatened strike), got a curt refusal of help from a lying bitch (no other word will do) who had said she would return to help and then denied it, though three strangers affirmed that she had. Then I got an older woman who said Don’t yell at me as I got testier and testier. Then she turned quite nice and put us up at the brand-new, very posh Harborplace Hyatt, the finest hotel any of us had ever spent the night in. A man at the hotel, seeing the students with their backpacks and remembering what it was like to be a student, bought everyone a round of drinks, and we watched a combo and relaxed.

The next morning I called Aer Lingus and got a semi-dunce named Angel who kept giving me contradictory information about how many seats he could get for us on Saturday night’s flight. Spending over three hours on the phone, I finally got a good person at US Air to get us all on American’s 6:30 p.m. Saturday flight to Heathrow with a three-hour layover and then Aer Lingus to Shannon Sunday morning. Liam Irwin, a history professor at Mary Immaculate College where we were going, and the exchange contact person, met us, the last remnant of the Frostburg State University crew, and got the students onto a bus to Limerick and drove me to my rental house, one that he owns in Dooradoyle, in the suburbs of Limerick, just off the N20 road to Cork and the road to Tralee and Killarney.

The house will do very well, having four (in a pinch, five) bedrooms and items necessary to run a household, like washer and dryer and cookpots, etc. Liam thought of about everything I would need at the outset. It is a 25-minute brisk walk to campus and 10 minutes to a supermarket, though a convenience store with some good groceries is but a 4-minute walk. Everything is quite green here in February, with primroses in bloom in window boxes in downtown Limerick when we arrived. Temperatures rarely get to freezing in Limerick, and Mary Immaculate’s campus has a few skaggy palm trees. Still, the weather was perfectly vile the first four or five days, with driving rain, winds sometimes to 60 miles per hour, and hail, so even temperatures in the 40s and 50s could be quite miserable. The city, Ireland’s third largest at 80,000 (though Galway is threatening to overtake its third spot, after Dublin and Cork), is moderately homely but close to the most beautiful regions of Ireland.

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The main building of Mary Immaculate College, Limerick.

All of the people met at Mary Immaculate have been super—warm, friendly, and generous in offering me rides if I wanted them (but I was determined to walk). Everyone, almost, on being introduced says, You are welcome to our country and laughs and jokes a great deal. However, the Protestant work ethic is not much in evidence, of course. Very laid-back. The faculty have tea, coffee, and cookies every morning at 10:30, all free, some people sitting and talking for nearly an hour. Many sit for a long while at lunch, and then there is another faculty tea at 3:30 every day. Conversation gets very lively, and the room fills with smoke.

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Passageway at Mary Immaculate College.

I had a hard time getting my teaching schedule and rooms and an office. The schedule had to wait until the FSU students all had their Irish courses scheduled, since I had to dodge around their schedules. I finally got Literature of the American South (a brand-new course for me) from 3 to 5:30 on Wednesday, Black American Literature (also new to me, the enrollment cut into by its being a course newly added to the M. I. offerings, with a newly hired professor, after I had proposed the course for my teaching load there) scheduled for 4 to 6:30 on Tuesday, and Advanced Composition (Frostburg State students only) from 9 to 11 on Thursday, with a half-hour tutorial in my office each week. My office I have to share with the Bank of Ireland on Monday and Thursday, and when I needed to get something from my desk when the bank employees were there, they seemed sure that I intended to rob the bank. Each Frostburg