[CHAPTER XIII]
In Galway with a Camera
GALWAY comes as near as any Irish city that I ever saw to rivaling New York's East Side for dirtiness, and yet a fair-minded observer would be compelled to tell Galway, when the time for awarding the leather medal came, that she was only a close second.
This does not so much mean that New York is dirtier than I realized she was when I was there as it means that Ireland is not as dirty as English and Irish and American writers have pictured it.
Perhaps in some parts of Ireland the pig still sleeps in the room with the family, but as a faithful chronicler of actual sights I cannot say that I saw such a sight in any of the numerous slums and villages I visited in twenty counties. I hate to destroy so poetic an illusion.
Picturesque Galway
There was something idyllic in the thought of a pink little pig and a pink little boy, the two of them the pink of neatness, lying side by side in a happy-hearted Irishman's cabin, while pig and boy and Irishman starved to death, but the truth was something better than that. There were pigs and little boys, but they were not neatly pink and they were not starving, and the old man did not swing a shillelagh or sing songs as I was passing by.
Shillelaghs were never so plentiful as they are now, but they are made to supply the foreign demand for them, and the Irishman is amused and perhaps a bit contemptuous as he sees Americans, with never a drop of Irish blood in them, buying shillelaghs to take home for the sake of sentiment.