Responsible Travel in Ireland

Gratefully, the simple steps of responsible travel are slowly becoming a much engrained normality. Airlines are investing in bio-fuels, hotels are using local produce and travellers are making better decisions on where and how to spend their tourist cash. The urgency of which we need to travel with more responsibility means that although these are all leaps in the right direction, we must always be striving to progress, sustainable and social, even more. Sometimes, this means making what can feel like smaller steps.

Perhaps confusingly, destination to destination there are area specific means to encompass sustainability to the maximum as a fleeting visitor. In Tuscany it might be drinking wines from the nearest vineyard. Where, you or I might well question who is ordering wine from New Zealand whilst in Italy if it is on the menu - someone is. In the same breath, you will also find destination to destination different focuses on maintaining tourism, a valuable source of income, whilst balancing authenticity. Like, providing menus in two languages, even if a local delicacy cannot be easily translated and needs explaining anyway.

Here, I wanted to focus on Ireland and the particular means to be environmentally and socially responsible when travelling around the Emerald Isle but also how the country has always been a few steps ahead.

Food

If you came for the Guinness, you’ll want to cure your hangover with the food. Fortunately, the Irish serve the type of fry ups that make your arteries creak - bacon swimming in sausage fat, sausages sweating in bacon fat, eggs frying in butter, lashings of butter, soda bread, wheaten bread, potato bread fried in fat and if you can stomach it, some of your five a day in the form of mushrooms, beans and roasted tomatoes.

Historically, the role of a breakfast of this size was to fuel farmers for the day ahead, when often lunch was not on the menu. As time passed and people found the time and income to afford a lunch, the ‘Irish Fry Up’ became a Sunday treat, an unrivalled hangover cure and break into Irish food and culture for visitors. The best bit? You will find much of the produce on your plates is not particularly well travelled.

In fact, the more rural you reach in Ireland, the harder it will be to find food from afar. So local are suppliers, eggs and vegetables carry no branding or stickers boasting where they have come from. If you really wanted to know, more often than not the shop keeper will be on first name terms with the producer. What’s more, this is not just farmed, harvested or baked for convenience sake, it is all done to outstanding standard. For example, so well produced is Connemara Lamb, Timoleague Brown Pudding and Clare Island Salmon they have ‘Protected Geographical Indication’. So sublime is the Atlantic stock of seafood of lobster, scallops, crab, cockles, oysters and mussels what the Irish can’t consume is shipped to Michelin Starred restaurants of Paris.

Foraging

With so much in abundance in their fields and on the sea shore, the Irish folk and landscape are a dab hand at not just making high quality produce, but also foraging it. Seaweed is a prime example. There are people in the world who believe there is a means to harvest carbon pollution from the sky into banks of seaweed. Feel guilty about the times you’ve raced to get away from between your toes?

Seaweed is an ingredient commonly associated with menus of the East – Japanese sushi for one. Where we in the West regularly but unwittingly consume it as a gelatine substitute in ice creams and jellys. We are altogether unfamiliar with seeing it outed on a menu. Yet, in Ireland chefs are challenging that. Foraging themselves for fresh seaweed to accompany their catch of the day and listing it on menus as a hero ingredient. They know that Pepper Dulse, heralded as the truffle of the sea, dried in the glitchy Irish sunshine and sprinkled over salad, fresh fish and vegetables for an additional earthy taste and zero mileage Irish soul.

So, there is a reason the Irish chowder is such a delicious fire side staple after a day contending with the weather throughout every Irish season. Fresh fish picked from the ocean outside that very morning accompanied by fresh cream and butter to further challenge your arteries, seasonal vegetables swimming alongside and if you are lucky sprinkled with dried seaweed. Every ingredient a fresh connection to the land around you, produced by the scenery you spent the day exploring. A local band an immersive side dish.

Irish Language & Accent

Language is a funny one to embrace when it so often is liable to setting tourists and locals apart. We all have a failed experience at ordering a croissant in a French boulangerie, I have seven. Yet, the Irish language is endangered, and not just because it is not taught in classrooms anywhere outside of Ireland. Even outside of the Irish classroom, 2% of the population speak Gaelic day to day making it the third most spoken language in Ireland behind English and Polish. If you have visited any part of the Republic of Ireland, this may come as a surprise because although you may not have heard the language, you will certainly have seen it.

As the need for a local language and dialect becomes increasingly valueless, it becomes incredibly hard to maintain. In fact, during the Great Famine when huge swathes of the country were emigrating, Anglo philanthropists were hard selling English with huge success, causing the Irish language to eventually die out. It was not until the late 19th century and the Irish Literary Renaissance, lead by William Yeats, that the language was reclaimed and soon become symbolic with Irish nationalism making it favoured again. However, in an English speaking world the language was at ease to become vulnerable again.

Today, tourists are vulnerable to seeing Irish language simply as a commodity, purchasing souvenirs with Irish vocab printed on them - Fáilte (Welcome) or Póg mo Thóin (Kiss my Arse). It is also widely associated with Irish drinking culture - you know you will always find good craic at the pub. So, tourism is not going to bring re-birth to the Irish language when it is accountable for making it worthless as visitor’s demand English. Then, it is also one of the only means to maintain some examples of it. Yet, a conscious tourist can pay more attention to it outside of pubs and souvenir shops. Veer away from trivialising and attempt to learn more about the languages past and what traces and themes there are in the landscape. Take Trá (beach) is an easy place to start.

Irish Drinking Culture

As good a place to end as a pint of Guinness at the end of an Irish day, Irish booze. With such an abundance of liquors and brews made on Irish turf, there is not much excuse to venture too far from what each pub has on tap. With peculiar ales pale and stout, abundance of cider and choice of whiskey there is plenty to sample. Just about the only thing the Irish do not do well is a glass of wine, which truth be told, will not warm your bones like a pint of the black stuff.

In Ireland drinking is a social affair that is contagious. Mixing at the bar is rife and encouraged. Expect local musicians and or travelling bands to play above the foray from a corner and cross your fingers that at some stage, punters are encouraged to get up and dance. Dance.