Tommy Makem's Secret Ireland

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUL 31, 1997

Folksinger Makem, who for years teamed with the Clancy Brothers, has penned a unique travel guide that is sure to delight those following it. Starting in Dublin and touring the country counterclockwise, he searches out the ancient and the remote. Cruising north to County Louth, Makem stops at Newgrange, the site of a megalithic gravesite whose mysteries have yet to be solved. He pauses at Tara, home of the first-century Irish kings, and continues to Belfast, which name he informs us is taken from the Irish Beal Feiriste, which means "The Mouth of the Sandy Ford." He goes back into the Republic to Donegal and Glencolmbkille, the retreat of Colmcille, Ireland's second most prominent saint after Patrick. Then it's down to County Mayo and Cong, where St. Fechin of Fore founded a monastery in the sixth century and John Ford made The Quiet Man in 1952. Makem goes south to the Ring of Kerry and the home of St. Brendan the Navigator, who is said to have discovered North America in the sixth century, then north through Cork and on to Wexford, the ancestral home of John F. Kennedy and of Wolfe Tone's lost Rebellion of 1798 where a song is remembered: "We are the Boys of Wexford/ Who fought with heart and hand/ To burst in twain the galling chain/ And free our native land." Makem ends his tour back in Dublin, where he reminisces about playing there for the first time with the Clancys in 1962. This charming book makes a great, lighthearted complement to Tom Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization. Photos.