BUCHANAN: Dublin Time Machine

Today 11th November is when blood sacrifices were offered for Martinmas, the Feast of St Martin of Tours. On Féile Mártain, ordinary families would kill a cock or a goose. The more well off would offer up a sheep or even a heifer at the threshold of the home. Their blood was sprinkled across the doorstep and into the four corners of the gaff, sometimes the hearth too. It was meant to bar sickness, bad luck and unwelcome spirits for the year ahead. A sick animal might be vowed to the saint in hope of a cure, and the better off were expected to share some of the meat with poorer neighbours.

There were some taboos surrounding Martinmas too. No wheel was to turn that night so no spinning, no mill, no cart. This was because legend St Martin of Tours had died under a mill wheel. In reality he died peacefully at Candes in 397.

The aforementioned goose has a story too. Martin had been a Roman soldier who famously cut his cloak in two for a freezing beggar. When the people of Tours wanted him as bishop, he supposedly hid in a goose pen, and the honking gave him away.

Why November? Well animals fattened on the autumn harvest were slaughtered because feeding them through the cold months was costly. Obviously the older answer is Samhain and many folklorists see the blood rite as a Christianised echo of Pagan customs. Its also reminiscent of Pentecost.

The 11th of November date itself might stem from calendar reform of 1752, which dropped eleven days and left some people marking the old dates. Martinmas was recorded across Ireland in the 1930s and 40s, and it lingered in pockets of the west into living memory.

Today in 1919, Ireland marked the first anniversary of the Armistice. Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom, but that January the First Dáil had met in the Mansion House and declared independence. Two ideas of Ireland now lived side by side, and neither acknowledged the other.

The war had divided us long before. In 1914 John Redmond urged the Volunteers to fight for the Empire, hoping to secure Home Rule. Others refused to trust a British promise, and the movement split. Thousands went to France, Flanders and Gallipoli. Others stayed home, trained and waited.

Days earlier, King George V had asked that at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, all normal life stop for two minutes. In Dublin railways and government offices paused, and banks and many factories suspended work. Flags flew over Trinity College. Traffic halted on College Green and men removed their hats. For many it was genuine mourning, in a country where few families were untouched.

But the silence didn't last as people asked who were these brave dead men being remembered as? British soldiers or Irishmen? Patriots or pawns? Then National University students marched onto College Green singing The Soldier's Song, and Trinity students answered with God Save the King. Fists, sticks and bricks flew until the Trinity men retreated as remembrance of war became a battlefield in its own right.

In Clonmel, a requiem mass was held in SS Peter and Paul's for nearly 300 local men. The numbers are staggering. About 210,000 Irishmen served in the British forces. Ireland's Memorial Records of 1923 list 49,435 dead, but only 30,986 were born in Ireland. Historians suggest the true Irish-born toll is nearer 40,000.

The Esker Riada, or Eiscir Riada as Gaeilge, is a fascinating natural formation and historical landmark stretching across the country from Dublin to Galway. Dating back to the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, it's a unique system of eskers, which are a type of glacial ridge composed of sand, gravel and boulders.

As glaciers melted, rivers running under them deposited these materials, creating the distinctive ridges that we see today. They're extremely obvious from satellite. The sandy, well-drained land was also valuable for agriculture, offering fertile ground amidst the otherwise boggy terrain of the region.

The Esker Riada passes through Dublin, Meath, Kildare, Westmeath, Offaly, Longford, Roscommon.and Galway. The most prominent remnants visible are in Teernacreeve in Westmeath, extending from Kilbeggan to Tyrrellspass.

This "great highway" linked major monastic settlements, including Clonard Abbey, Durrow Abbey, and the renowned Clonmacnoise, located where the River Shannon intersects the esker.

Also known as An tSlí Mhór, or "The Great Way," the Esker Riada provided relative safety and efficiency due to the slightly elevated, well-drained path it paved through the bogs and wetlands of the Irish midlands.

Historically, the Esker Riada held deep cultural and political significance. As Gaeilge Eiscir Riada combines "escir" (ridge)
and "ríad" (riding or driving horses or oxen). This elegantly describes its role as a key route for travel and transportation. They also served as demarcation lines in the near perpetual wars our ancestors fought.

Following the battle of Mag Lena in the 2nd century, the eskers served as a natural dividing line, separating two political regions. These were Leath Cuinn (Conn’s Half) to the north and Leath Mogha (Mogha’s Half) to the south. Basically, it was a savage geopolitical partition dividing the northern and southern halves of Ireland. I'm glad we'll soon be rid of that primitive fantasy(!)

The legacy of the Esker Riada endures even today. The main N6 Dublin-to-Galway road closely follows its path. In our Fair City, the route begins near High Street, beside Wood Quay. Of course, this Viking hub was also host to a historic vertical crossing, the eponymous "Átha Cliath" (the Hurdle Ford), which inspired the city’s name.

Today in 1798, Theobald Wolfe Tone stood before a court martial at the Royal Barracks in Dublin and made an iconic speech, in the uniform of a French officer, that would echo through history. Outside, the cursed rebellion of that summer lay it tatters, its other leaders hanged or shot or driven into exile.

Tone had been taken a month earlier at Buncrana, after the French flagship Hoche was battered into surrender off Lough Swilly. Sir George Hill, a Trinity man who'd known him from ages before, recognised Tone among the French officers. Tone had spent years in Paris persuading the Directory to back an Irish republic. His vision was simple and dangerous. Replace the labels of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter with the common name of Irish.

In the dock he didn’t deny the charge of treason, telling the court that from his earliest youth he'd seen the connection with England as the curse of the Irish nation, and that while it lasted the country could never be free or happy.

His one request was to be shot as a soldier rather than hanged like a felon. Cornwallis refused him. So on the night before the execution Wolfe Tone cut his own throat with a penknife.

John Philpot Curran, famous barrister and a friend of Tone's, went to the Court of King's Bench and argued that a military tribunal had no right to try a civilian while the civil courts were open. The judge, Lord Kilwarden, granted a writ of habeas corpus ordering Tone's execution delayed, but the army ignored it.

The self inflicted wound did not kill him quickly. Tone lingered in agony for about a week, and the story goes he joked to the prison surgeon that he was a bad anatomist. He died on 19 November, aged 35.

He's buried in the churchyard at Bodenstown, Co. Kildare, a place of pilgrimage ever since. Pearse delivered a famous oration there in 1913, and his dream that the people of this island should govern it themselves, united not by creed but by a shared home and a shared future, will one day come true.

Rest in peace Johnny McEvoy (1945 to 2026) McEvoy was born in Banagher, Co. Offaly, on the banks of the Shannon, and was singing from the age of four. The family moved to Dublin when he was six, his father a bus driver, and he grew up in Inchicore. He wanted to be a commercial artist, studied in Rathmines and landed a job in an advertising agency, to his parents' delight.

At night he sang folk with his pal Mick Crotty as the Ramblers Two, in the pubs and hotels of the great Irish folk boom. In 1966 he made the call his parents didn't want. He was on £8 a week in advertising and could earn the same in one night as a solo singer, so he quit. His first single went nowhere.

He filled out the visa forms for America, where his sister was waiting in Kansas, while singing in Maureen Potter's show at the Gaiety. Then his manager Tom Costello talked him into one last go at home. Billed as The Rambler, he recorded Muirsheen Durkin, an old emigrant ballad about a man chasing gold in California. A song about leaving that kept him here.

It held the top spot for three weeks. The Boston Burglar followed in 1967, then Nora in 1968. For a few giddy years he was chased down O'Connell Street by adoring fans, guitar under his oxter, one of Ireland's first real pop stars. He played Carnegie Hall, and even said he was more confused than ever because things were going too well.

When the Ballrooms of Romance ruled, a solo folk singer was only allowed 45 minutes between the dancing. So in 1970 he did what many did and formed a show band. If you can't beat them, join them. The hits kept coming, he had his own RTÉ series, and he graced the cover of Spotlight magazine more than any other solo act of the era.

The songs he wrote himself may be his truest legacy. Long Before Your Time, the first single he recorded that he had written himself, went to number one in 1976, his fourth chart topper. Michael followed, and so did The Planter's Daughter, a love song for his beloved wife Odette, whom he met in 1967 and married in 1970. She passed away in 2013 and he sang her song for the rest of his life.

In the 1990s he was ahead of his time trying to break the stigma around men's mental health, speaking openly on national television about his depression. He worked across six decades and was still filling venues this year. His music often filled our gaff and car growing up. Thanks for the memories sir.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.