'Going Home to Mayo, Winter 1949', Paul Durcan (Critical Essay‪)‬

Dubliners are like denizens of other capitals in relation to the rest of their countrymen. They think the world drops off somewhere at an iconic portal at its far suburban reaches. If there were a map of Dublin similar to the famous New Yorker cover which showed an atrophied view of the US with a dimly designated 'Chicago' and the expanses beyond simply labelled 'Vegas' or 'Texas', the Irish map from the Dubliner's eye view would be marked 'The Naas Road' (that was), 'Cork', 'The West'--with arrows pointed vaguely in the direction of Connemara--and 'The North'. This cartoonish rift might provoke a knowing chuckle, but the reality is that many Dubliners in the century past were not allowed to be Dubliners. Among the writers thus affected one could start with James Joyce and his autobiographical rendering in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man of Stephen Dedalus's ghastly trip 'home' to Cork with his father as the latter sells off Stephen's patrimony. A variation on this fictional theme continued to be recorded in prose by Edna O'Brien and John McGahern whose portraits of country people turned Dublin flat-dwellers told of their returning home to pick up their lives there at irregular intervals. Those of us of a certain age knew them or saw them racing to Busaras on Friday evenings--going home--often a long journey on bad roads. They went home to Tralee, Thurles, and Athenry, to the dances, to help in the family shop, or to save the hay on as many weekends as they could afford--the generation with one foot in each place. For still others, memory of a home place prevailed in a Dublin house which was their home place, but not that of their parents. These young people lived under earlier-ordained protocols which ranked city far below country. The city, they were told, could only offer an ersatz life, even if it were a comfortable life in Dublin 4 or 6. It all came down to land, topography, regional accent, and lineage. 'Lineage', a recurring notion in Yeats's work for which he was castigated and deemed to have delusions of grandeur, was implicit in the ethos of these homes too. Dubliners may have been Liffey-centric but there was an equal degree of blinkered vision in the opposite direction.