Let’s focus on the light at the end of the tunnel

World of Politics with Harry McGee

About a mile from where I live in Dublin, you reach the banks of the River Dodder. Like a lot of Irish rivers, the more civic-minded authorities of recent years have begun to make these wonderful places more accessible to people.

There’s a path along stretches of the river’s banks and one day soon, you will be able to walk along it from Ringsend as far as Tallaght and then into the Dublin mountains.

Those paths – and the public parks you encounter along the way – have always been popular with walkers and runners and picnicking families and nature photographers and angler.

But popular was a relative term before the pandemic. On fine days during lockdown, the paths were as clogged as the Liffey Quays or the M50 during rush-hour, as thousands of families and individual who had never bother before discovered the ‘marvel of the micro’.

People would spend hours watching the kingfisher (An Cruidín in Irish) dive from its low perch in a small spectacular colour explosion of cobalt blue and tangerine orange.

Or the heron (Corr Réisc) standing still above the weir. Or the little dipper (which has the gorgeous Irish name of gabha dubh) diving under where the waters cascade. Of the fox (madra rua/sionnach) sleeping on the far bank, or the occasional sight of an otter (madra uisce).

My running route had taken me along the banks of the river for about four kilometres a few times a week since moving here in 2017 but I never really stopped and took time to stop and stare at the simple, tiny, quotidian things that were happening (and always happened) right under my eyes.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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