Hi everybody,

Don't know if i'm on a nostalgic mood or what, but I was just listening to this song and I ended up holding back the tears, like I hadn't done for a long time when listening to Irish music. May be it has something to do with remembering the time when I visited Moher Cliffs and I spent quite a long time sitting on the ground close to the cliffs just looking over the sea and letting my thoughts flow. It took me ten minutes of heavy Irish rain to leave the place but I ended up giving thanks for the rain, as it hid my tears.

I somewhere read a sentence that said something like "what's the use of being Irish if it doesn't break your heart?" (it may even be someone's signature on the forum, my memory is bad for details lately). The thing is that I wasn't born Irish, but sometimes Ireland happenst to break my heart anyway.

Don't know if I'm making any sense at this time of the night, but I just felt like telling this to someone who would not laugh at me for saying I left my soul behind last time I left Ireland. So, as someone in this forum said somewhere, if anyone finds my soul over in Ireland, please don't send it back... at least a part of me is still in that dear old land of mine

Sl�n,
Keltic_Banshee

I know exactly how you feel. I've never even been to Ireland, and I feel the same way. It's the one place in this world that I want to visit more than anything! I want to go to the place where my ancestors were born and spent thier lives. I want to go and share my Irish heritage with people who know and understand. I want to be around people who aren't going to look at me as if I have 3 heads for loving Celtic music. Someday I'm gonna get there, and I dunno if I'm coming back

Yes that's my signature : a phrase by JFK I modified.

Like you I left all my heart and soul and mind in Ireland. Even before I first came to Ireland. I love Ireland since I'm 9 and I've fist been there at the age of 15. The only thing that has changed is now I can say I've been there and that it's truly as I had always expected it to be, just much better.
I couldn't really say where is my favourite place amongst those I've been to. And I have memories in all of these places. I remember feeling so widely awake in co. Kerry. I was in a car (yellow cinquecento ) in a valley and the green hills had suddenly filled my whole sight. In co. Clare, I remember the wind so violent on Ailwee mountain. I watched all around and I could see Ireland evrywhere. It was so windy, I could nearly fly. It was as if the weight of my own mind had been released in the air and lost forever. I opened dozens of gates to let my host's car pass, hurt my hand with one of them, but it didn't matter : wasn't I opening the gates of Heaven? In Limerick, I remember spending hours in Arthur's Quay park, watching the Shannon flow. For me, this little place, and the view on King John Castle, St Mary's Cathedral and the hills of Clare so far away and yet so close, that's whole Limerick. And there's my village, 20 miles south from the city. The house of my hosts and the hours I've spent playing with their children, riding horses in fields, having fun with the other students hosted there or talking with my hosts. And Cork, with all its churches and the Lee. And all the pubs I've been in and the people I met in each. I do not forget any of them, nor even those I've only seen once. They made it true that in the Irish pubs "there's no stranger, there's only people we haven't met yet".
Ireland is never only about tourism (unless you come with a whole bunch of Parisians who believe they're going to Club Med).

Hi everybody,

great song indeed.

btw just saw stanley kubrick's "barry lyndon", an epic movie about irish wanderer based on novel by thackeray. great movie. ant there was that scene when barry met another irishman away from his country and they both got along just because of that tho they were supposed to be enemies. i wish all the nations had that kind of sense of belonging...