IRELAND

DID YOU KNOW?

Not only is there a big Norse mixture in all Irish ancestry, but every one of Ireland's coastal cities were founded by the Vikings.

Fashionable St. Stephens Green in the heart of Dublin is named after a small hospital that used to be there---for lepers.

There were quite a lot of British in early Ireland. The Irish kept them as slaves.

Saint Patrick was not the first Christian missionary in Ireland. Ireland's lack of snakes had nothing to do with the saint. At the end of the last Ice Age, the arctic waters cut Ireland off from Britain before the snakes could get across.

Until the 17th century, Irish women had more freedom and more rights than English women. A man wanting to obtain the coveted freedom of Dublin could get it by marrying a woman who had it in her own right.

Divorce was common in early Ireland, right through the Christian Middle Ages. Married priests and abbots were also common in those days.

Jonathan Swift's great book, Gullliver's Travels, contains some very curious names. Some of these are in fact jokes in the Irish language, which Swift could speak.

Cromwell had to send many of his troops home before embarking for Ireland because they refused to fight a war that would deny Catholics the right to practice their religion. These English troops thought all men should be free to worship as they pleased.

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Notice the birds on top of our apartment complex when we left for Ireland.

 Sites on the way to Cairnryan.

What a nice comment as you leave their city.

We finally made it to Cairnryan and the ferry. See it in the middle of the picture?

Beautiful day.

Arriving in Belfast.

Ireland looks much the same, doesn't it?

I have never seen so many cattle sitting down on the job.Doug says, What is their job?

Lots of forest.

Modern bridge.

Ireland is divided. The north is UK and uses pounds for money and travels with mph. The south of Ireland is the Republic of Ireland. It has English and Celtic names on all of the signs. We travel in kilometers, so have to watch how fast Elder goes. The money is in Euros. The entire country is much more expensive to live in than Scotland.

The cost is 1.40-1.60 Euros/liter of gas. You still drive on the left side of the road.