“I can truly say, I have spent some of the happiest moments of my life since landing in this country. I seem to have undergone a transformation. I live a new life... Instead of the bright blue sky of America, I am covered with the soft grey fog of the Emerald Isle. I breathe, and lo! the chattel becomes a man.” That’s what #frederickdouglass wrote in 1846 about his four months in Ireland and I feel the same every time I am there. I have thought all day today about how I’ve said too many times to count that I would move to Ireland in a heartbeat...and not just cos that land behind me was home to my Dwyer ancestors for a thousand years before the British stole it, starved them to death, and enslaved them. Indeed, Douglass described what he saw in Ireland as the “same degradation as the American slave.” I imagine the suffering my forebears endured on both sides of my family tree, and how some of those ancestors might have stood in the same spot I’m standing on in this photo, which is where St. Patrick baptized the High King of Munster—St. Patrick’s Rock—and prayed for St. Padraig to come back and drive out the British. (Or at least let a leprechaun and some faeries accomplish that?) Funny how the most oppressed peoples are “cool” now. Everyone wants to be “Irish” — or “Black”— until it gets hard. Just remember tho, you can’t claim it if you don’t understand the sacrifice of blood soaked into that earth. Perhaps that’s what really makes the grass so green. #blackirish #ireland #dwyer #cotipperary #stpatricksday #moreblacksmoredogsmoreirish #vertussolasnobilitas (at Cashel, Tipperary) https://www.instagram.com/p/BvI-R-nA5hG/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=pk05xdk2r67o
