A land of pubs, poets and prose

Music is a staple at most pubs in the north and south of Ireland. Picture / Tourism Ireland

It was the smell of the nuns she used to love, back in the days when she played hopscotch on Dorset St in Dublin. "I used to push as close to them as possible and take big sniffs of them. But that was nothing to when they came up to the room to see Mother. You'd get it terribly strong then."

One day, on hearing this kind of talk, father bluntly enlightened the blathering child - there was no smell.

Of course. "It was the no-smell that I used to get, but there were so many smells fighting for place in Dorset St - fried onions, and garbage, and old rags - that a person with no smell stood out a mile."

It is just before 9pm on a cool night in Dorset St and one of the guides leading the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl is trailing a 35-strong gaggle of tourists and performing an excerpt from Mary Lavin's short story, My Vocation, outside a former church that is now a tourist centre.

The crawl alternates drinks in pubs such as O'Neills and the Duke with a walking tour, in which the guides tell stories from the works and lives of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Beehan, Oscar Wilde. The bowler hats go on for a pub rendition of an excerpt from Waiting for Godot.

Something Wilde is delivered outdoors at Trinity College, a joke from the booze-hound Beehan explains the difference between prose and poetry.

A trademarked and tourist-packaged pub crawl is like an attack dog with no teeth, a gummy echo of the original concept but the guides are professionals, the stories irresistible.

For a quick dunking in things Irish, this is the business. At the end of the night, the crawlers are happy, somewhat better informed, and a bit Guinnessed around the edges.

This is night one of a seven-night trip to the Republic of Ireland (that's the one that uses euros) and Northern Ireland (that's the one that uses pounds).

The main focus is the north.

On day two, our journalistic posse is still in the republic and heads 40km north of Dublin - nothing is far here, but few drive fast and everyone apologises for the roads - to Newgrange, near the River Boyne, scene of the Battle of the Boyne in the 17th century.

Newgrange is a big circular mound ringed by standing stones, with a "passage grave" inside and tour buses and a cafeteria nearby.

The site is unknown to our group - maybe to most New Zealanders - but devotees see it as one of the world's sacred places. Post-visit, I'll buy that.

Inside the mound, an 18.9m passage of standing stones - average height 1.5m - leads to a central chamber abutted by three side chambers.

At 5200-years-old, Newgrange pre-dates Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt.

Like Stonehenge, it is megalithic - pre-historic and made of very big stones - and a star in the firmament of archaeoastronomy, the field that brings together archaeology, anthropology, mythology and astronomy.

Once a year, on and around the winter solstice, the sun shines through a roof box and penetrates the central chamber.

In modern Ireland, a lottery decides who will be inside on those days.

We are not lottery winners and this is not that day.

One of our number wisely begs off entering, claustrophobic, and we squeeze through some tight spots between the rocks to enter the artificially lit central chamber.

"You've got to imagine warm honey colours just shimmering around the rocks," says the guide, imagining the scene at the solstice.

The place has a magical presence. The Boyne Valley is dotted with prehistoric sites and it is easy to imagine an intriguing trip, taking in the well-visited and the tourist-bypassed majority.

I leave the others and drive 175km west to Galway to visit an Irish relative I have never met and to stand with him in a rainswept cemetery by a crumbling church, paying some respects.

He tells me I talk too fast, or maybe, he says, the Irish just "listen slow".

We part at a pub. Someone there writes directions to my next destination on a betting slip.

I hook up with the group at Enniskillen, on the Lower Lough Erne in Northern Ireland, and meet our guide for the rest of the trip, Ken McElroy.

He is a near lookalike of the television presenter Michael Parkinson and is also the author of - and a performer in - a play about the Irish writers Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan.

Inevitably, he can reel off the lyrics, rhymes and stories that fit each of our destinations.

Inevitably, he knows the one from Behan that popped up in the Dublin crawl, about the difference between prose and poetry.

There were two young brothers named Pollocks

Who swore they were both alcoholics

They went for a swim

And the tide it came in

And the water it rose to their knees.

The pay-off line is: "That's prose. But if the water had risen another ten inches it would be pure poetry."

Heading north from Enniskillen, we hit Derry, formerly Londonderry, the city famous for the 17th-century walls that enclose its heart, for the 105-day siege of the Protestant citizens in 1688, and for the Bloody Sunday killings by the British military in 1972.

At the Bogside, a Catholic stronghold and the scene of some of the worst of the Troubles, we tourists snap away at the big political murals painted on walls - stark and powerful.

Over there: the activist Bernadette Devlin, megaphone in hand.

Across there: a boy in a gas mask, carrying a petrol bomb, a scene from the Battle of the Bogside in August 1969.

A wall proclaims, "You are now entering Free Derry".

"Living history" tours like these are also big in Belfast, where black taxis take tourists to the murals on the Falls and Shankill Rds.

"It's really big business," says McElroy.

Gritty Belfast would probably rather be better known for other things - such as the construction of the Titanic ("She was all right when she left here ... " reads the T-shirt, a little lamely) or the leaning Albert Memorial Clock.

That is the one the locals claim is better than the Leaning Tower of Pisa because it has the inclination and the time.

"The last terrorist incident was eight years ago," says McElroy. "All army patrols and checkpoints have been phased out over the past three years."

When we visited, no soldiers were visible on the streets, fortifications around police stations were being removed, and police on foot patrol no longer wore flak jackets. Exiting Belfast, we head east.

At the little coastal village of Donaghadee, which looks across to Scotland, McElroy is at it again, reciting Forty Shades of Green:

I close my eyes and picture, The emerald of the sea,

From the fishing boats at Dingle to the shores of Donaghdee.

I miss the river Shannon and the folks at Skippereen,

The moorlands and the midlands with their forty shades of green.

I wish that I could spend an hour by Dublin's churning surf,

See the farmers drain the meadows, work the bogs and spade the turf.

And to see the thatcher thatching with the straw the colleens gleen.

I'd walk from Cork to Larne to see the forty shades of green.

A famous old Irish poem? Nah, Johnny Cash - whose poetic licence dropped the second A in Donaghadee to fit the metre of the song. Always check those Irish stories.

* Paul Panckhurst travelled courtesy of Tourism Ireland and Cathay Pacific.

Getting there

Cathay Pacific has return economy class fares from New Zealand to Dublin Cork and Shannon for $2099. These fares must be purchased by the end of February and are available for travel until mid-June. Cathay Pacific has 10 flights a week to Hong Kong with convenient connecting flights to Britain/Europe.

Further information

Tourism Ireland can be contacted at (09) 977 2255 or tourismireland.com