Irish Abortion

The Irish are having a referendum on whether to repeal the 8th amendment to their constitution, which bans abortion.

Struck by the bluntness of the campaigning. 

Feel the experience of growing up around Catholic anti-abortion people helps explain things that seem incomprehensible to some liberal pals, like how people could vote for Roy Moore (or Donald Trump).

People hate abortion protesters. ‘They’re so shrill and awful.’ But they think babies are being murdered. What are they supposed to be (saying)? ‘Well, hmmm … that’s not cool.

(Don’t ask who said that.)

Is anyone convincing anyone on this one?

Not easy to find “new” arguments on the abortion issue but Irish novelist Sally Rooney made a point I hadn’t heard stated so cleanly before:

Yes. Pregnancy, entered into willingly, is an act of generosity, a commitment to share the resources of life with another incipient being. Such generosity is in no other circumstances required by law. No matter how much you need a kidney donation, the law will not force another person to give you one. Consent, in the form of a donor card, is required even to remove organs from a dead body. If the foetus is a person, it is a person with a vastly expanded set of legal rights, rights available to no other class of citizen: the foetus may make free, non-consensual use of another living person’s uterus and blood supply, and cause permanent, unwanted changes to another person’s body. In the relationship between foetus and woman, the woman is granted fewer rights than a corpse. But it’s possible that the ban on abortion has less to do with the rights of the unborn child than with the threat to social order represented by women in control of their reproductive lives.

(Don’t like how they spell fetus as foetus.  One of many upsetting aspects.)

Anyway, let’s see who wins!  The vote goes down Friday.

Fairy Fort

My assistant shows us the height of the walls.

This part of the fort was too well defended to explore.

Note the width of the walls.  This suggests fairies of significant size.  Not inconceivable that these fairies stood as high as five or even six apples.

The inhabitants of the fort wallow in safety.

Many forts like this can be found in Ireland, sometimes billed as “Iron Age forts.” When was the Iron Age?

The Iron Age is taken to end, also by convention, with the beginning of the historiographical record. This usually does not represent a clear break in the archaeological record; for the Ancient Near East the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire c. 550 BC (considered historical by virtue of the record by Herodotus) is usually taken as a cut-off date, in Central and Western Europe the Roman conquests of the 1st century BC. The Germanic Iron Age of Scandinavia is taken to end c. AD 800, with the beginning Viking Age.

The distant and mysterious past, in other words. 

Insight into the “crazed Wisconsin” period of Irish history.

Mysterious Antiquities of Ireland

Way out there in the Dingle peninsula they’ve got the Gallarus / Gallros / Ghallrois:

What is it?

The oratory was built by early christians who loved their trade.  Life was much simpler then, and men understood God and His ways much better than they do now

The construction is impressive.  

Wikipedia only adds to the mystery:

Dates and uses

Minor trial cuttings carried out at Gallarus in November 1970 yielded no finds or evidence of features or activity which might shed light on the period of construction and use of the oratory.

An early Irish stone church

Antiquarian Charles Smith^[7] is the originator of the claim that the building is an early Irish stone church although no historical information is available prior to 1756 regarding its use.

Gotcha.  It more or less “appears” in written history in 1756?  This area, while beautiful, is remote.  People still speak Irish there now, can only imagine what it was like in 1756

A Romanesque Church

In 1970, archaeologist Peter Harbison argued that the oratory might have been built as late as the 12th century for a number of reasons, mainly because the east window has a rounded top made of two carved stones (not a true arch).

Hmm!  Arch evidence.

A private funerary chapel

Harbison also produced some evidence pointing to a later date and a different use: a letter by English traveller Richard Pococke who visited the oratory in 1758, two years after it was discovered by Charles Smith:^[10] “Near this building they show a grave with a head at the cross of it and call it the tomb of the Giant; the tradition is that Griffith More was buried there, & as they call’d [it] a chapel, so probably it was built by him or his family at their burial place.”

A tomb for giants? I love this!

A shelter for pilgrims

In 1994 and 1995, Peter Harbison gave up the hypothesis of a 12th-century church and claimed that the placename Gallarus meant “the house or shelter of foreigner(s)” (Gall Aras), the said “foreigner(s)” being pilgrims from outside the peninsula.^[12] However, this does not accord with lexicologist Padraig O Siochfhradha’s translation of the name as “rocky headland” (Gall-iorrus).

I remember the word aras in Irish because Bus Aras is where you catch the bus.  The bus house.

Gall:

A steam bath?  The English house?  The walnut place?

Killer location, anyway.

French tourists

thought they were ruining my photo but now I see they were essential.

Wars Of The Irish Kings

In fact, land in pre-twelfth century Ireland had little political value.  Although there were rich plains, it was not a farming culture but a decentralized grazing one in which wealth was measured in cattle.  There were no cities, and the kingdoms, which rarely had roads or clearly defined boundaries, were separated by a dense forests and bogs, which were more of a deterrent to travel (or easy military movement) than the mountains.  A reading of the  sometimes-cryptic early annals suggests and endless series of battles and cattle raids.  To be glib, early medieval Ireland sounds like a somewhat crazed Wisconsin, in which every dairy farm is an armed at perpetual war with its neighbors, and every farmer claims he is a king.

Some tite illustrations in the book:

For a dip into Irish history, you can’t top:

The illustrations go a long way towards telling the story.

It’s not all bad. 

Edward McGuire’s portrait of Seamus Heaney.