英語聽力：愛爾蘭的故事—1

There is an Ireland shrouded in cliché, of heroes and villains, lost battles and sad songs. Perched on the margins of Europe, a claustrophobic island cut off from the world, its people turned in upon themselves, victims of their own ancient hatreds and of a powerful neighbor.

That is not the Ireland of this journey. Our earliest writing showed that we looked to worlds beyond the green island. From the patterns of our landscape to the routes of our cities, we were shaped by waves of migration and invasion. New languages, faiths, cultures came from outside and still do. I will travel to the physical landscape and the ideas and peoples of a story striking because it is so unpredictable. But it's also a journey through other worlds whose history changed Ireland, crossing continents from Europe to America to Africa. The old view which saw the complex history of Ireland solely within the boundaries of what happened on this island, or simply through the prism of conflict between the British and the Irish, is mistaken, but above all, self-limiting. The real story of Ireland is so much bigger.

I remember walking in this garden of remembrance in 1966 with my father. It was the 50th anniversary of the Rising of 1916 and a great wave of patriotic sentiments swept the country.