Jaywalking with the Irish - European Travel Books

Paperback - 30 October, 2004 - Lonely Planet Publications
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By: David Monagan
ISBN: 1740595971

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Reviews by readers

A brilliant blend of humor, wit, travel and history

I delighted in the armchair journey with David Monagan and his family as they embarked on their adventure to Ireland. It's refreshing to read a travel memoir that gets past the stereotypes to relate what's truly special about Ireland and its people.

This book is a must read for anyone who has ever longed to leave the familiar to take on new challenges and adventures. It also offers lots of delicious nuggets along the way and inspiration to book the next flight to Ireland.

If your lucky enough to be Irish..your lucky enough!

For those who treasure their Irish heritage, Jaywalking with the Irish is a dream come true. David Monagan describes his families life in Ireland and their first hand experiences with the changes in the Irish standard of living, and the "Celtic Tiger". However, as much as things have changed, Monagan story demonstrates how the Irish personalities,their character, their superstitions, their humor and warmth are still the same. Great book!

Thought-provoking if uneven look at today's Irish disruptions

Monagan offers a sobering take on how Ireland accepts and rejects his attempts to relocate there in the early 00's. His observations on petty theft, killer (literally) traffic, suburban blight, environmental destruction, binge drinking, relocated romantics, and boorish behavior certainly should correct the sentimentality of many visitors to his adopted city of Cork and its environs. It's rare, it still seems, to find a book outside of the Irish presses that interrogates today's gritty attitudes amidst an unsettlingly glitzy urban Ireland outside of Belfast or Dublin. The book works best when tackling the changes Ireland finds itself in over especially the last ten or fifteen years. Monagan's very good on how Irish conversation draws out the naive outsider to reveal a weakness while the native conversant remains protected, watching but not revealing. He also plumbs the puzzling indifference shown by many Irish today to the loss of their heritage as foreign capital invades and conquers in the name of profit once again.

What hobbles this account are a variety of structural and factual stumbles as he recounts his move. First, how he and his family survive, after renting out their Connecticut house and relocating, remains too unclear, given that David has only free-lance writing to pay the exorbitant food, tuition, tax, and housing bills that anyone living in Ireland is sadly familiar with. How his wife fares with her work is also left too vague. Secondly, parts of this book read as if he inserted his free-lance work (on the Kinsale Old Head golf course monstrosity and on the volunteer rescue brigades) as chapters here rather jarringly. Third, the facts behind the reason for the various pieces sculpture garden at Sneem, the confusion of Knock with Croagh Patrick, and the ignorance that he shows towards not bothering to find out the simple reason the local GAA field is called "Pairc Ui Choamh" show a superficial attention to telling details that a more thorough chronicler would have investigated.

To be fair, the author has corresponded with me since I originally posted this review, and noted, correctly, that to delve too "academically" into the pedantry behind the offhand Pairc remark, uttered by not the author but another man at the match, would take away from the anecdote and interfere with the telling of the whole incident. I agree, and stand corrected. By the way, the author has gone on to stay in Ireland, appear on talk shows, and to pursue his writing career, more power to him.

However, I respectfully wish that he'd have gone further into what could have been intriguing stories. For instance, he raises in one sentence a potentially illuminating example of rural Irish culture on Valentia Island but neglects to develop this further, leaving the reader deflated at the hasty end to a chapter and wondering why he bothered to bring it up, since his time spent exploring there remains enigmatic. Finally, the end of the book stutters and hesitates as he vacillates whether to return to the US for good in the wake of the 2001 attacks. The last portion rushes while the first part had taken its time exploring the first year there. The book ends less than neatly, not knowing when to stop the story. This may be appropriate in reflecting Monagan's divided loyalties, but it does not culminate in a well-crafted conclusion on the page.

I still recommend this as an antidote to the "I bought a B&B/farm and here are tales from the lovable locals I met" genre for its portrayal of anti-American sentiment, threatened cultural and ecological conditions, and intriguing if too brief scenes from rural Co Cork that add to the book's relevance. It's worth comparing to the nearly contemporaneously composed travelogue by British writer Pete McCarthy, "McCarthy's Bar," in its overlapping and concurrent Cork focus. And it recalls in its considerations of Northeast US-Irish upbringing that of another contemporary, Steve Fallon, whose Boston-meets-Connemara journey frames his book "Home with Alice." Like these, "Jaywalking" examines the attempt of Irish Americans to settle in reverse of the usual historical direction, and in its reminders of how delicate the values of Irish life become in an relentlessly consumer-driven and globalized existence into which Ireland has now plunged itself (nearly?) wholeheartedly.

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