pubs at lonely country crossroads, pubs lining village streets,

pubs at lonely country crossroads, pubs lining village streets, pubs standing shoulder-to-shoulder in lively Dublin, spilling their smoke and their songs and sometimes their drunks into the latenight air.

The pub in Ireland, mind you, is not to be compared with a bar or tavern in America. The pub is Ireland’s social center, a gathering place, a shelter from the cold and from loneliness. It is a place to drink, of course, but more than that In an Irish pub you are likely to rind an old man, bundled in dark woolens, reading The Irish Independent in mid-afternoon, nursing a black pint of Guinness. Or two middle-aged women, just after shopping on Grafton Street sharing a gossipy lunch of fish and chips, with strong tea. Or a cluster of Irish lads, a muscular, noisy bunch, cheering a rugby match on the telly, over half-empty pints. In the county pubs, you are apt to find a shaggy dog sleeping by a glowing turf fire, and perhaps a married couple sharing cheese and ham sandwiches with redhaired, freckled toddlers.

Such are the scenes that linger in my mind’s eye as I reflect on my midwinter Irish holiday. Marcy, who has been in Dublin since last September, showed Chris and me around to her favorite haunts and her flat in Rathmines, a city neighborhood of solid brick Victorian houses. We rode Dublin’s green doubledecked buses, walked the city’s rainslicked streets, explored bookstores and shops, saw a play at the Abbey Theater, shared dinners in small cafes, and lingered over pints in pubs named O’Neill’s, the Duke and the Long Stone, O’Donoghue’s and Fitzsimmon’s.

To remind my two children of their Irish roots, I took them by bus to the ancient town of Trim, which my greatgrandfather left in the 1850s for1 America. There we walked about the impressive mins of Trim castle, built about the year 1215 by the Norman invaders who came to subjugate the native clans of Ireland.

The huge stone castle, surrounded by its fortress walls and towers, looms over the quiet village like a mythical vision, dark and brooding, a living memory of a long-dead past. It is the grandest castle ruin in Ireland (grand enough to be-used as the setting for Mel Gibson’s movie “Braveheart”) and so it proved an exciting subject for my photographer son. It’s amazing to think that my greatgrandfather may have played as a boy among these ruins, and even in his day they were over 600 years old.

It is that sense of age, of centuries of struggle and endurance, that impresses a visitor from the new world to this very old world. Ireland endures against the