The three new saints of Ireland

Apocryphal stories are best; Ireland's full of them.

The bookseller in Derry says the government pays good money if you had something harmed in "the troubles." A dent in a car fender could have been made by a bullet, a rip in the sleeve of a jacket by a knife, a cigarette burn on a piece of old furniture by a small handmade bomb. You didn't have to have irrefutable evidence; you just took the damaged object to the proper authority, filled out a little paperwork, and the check would be mailed to you, no questions asked. The bookseller who told me this said he'd heard there was to be a National Museum someday, but when I Googled the project nothing came up.

Joe of Fermanagh said he smuggled the horse out of Wales in a VW van. We were standing at the corral when he said this, stroking the mare's head and feeding it cherries from a paper bag. You got this horse inside your VW van, drove the van past the authorities in Wales without detection, and boarded the ferry for Ireland? I said. Sure did, Joe said, my youngest son Chris was aboard too.

I was itching to say there's no way you fit that horse in a VW van, much less drove the van past the border authorities in Wales without them knowing you had a horse, but I was a guest in Joe's house and didn't want to offend him. The horse, if it really was Welsh, got to Ireland somehow and somehow ships do get inside bottles.

By the time I reached Dublin I was tired of Ireland; the place was too full of unanswerable questions. What, for instance would Samuel Beckett, a man known for giving whatever coat he was wearing at the time to a beggar in the street, think of the new bridge in Dublin named after him? I think he'd think the money could have been spent much better elsewhere.