Heimat/homeplace means a place of safety, familiarity and security which can live on in our imagination sometimes even when we have left or been forced to flee. A place where shelter, food, culture and nature intertwine. Inhumanity destroys it for all of us. We have to learn to discover it again in new forms of exchange and experience. Here on Achill Island, I am grateful for the space to reflect on what inhumanity and destruction does to Heimat/homeplace. For those left speechless by the Israel/Palestine conflict, please give one and half hours to the taz talk in English with www.standing-together.org / https://taz.de/!vn5976800 under the taz talk photo slide the permission to go onto Youtube to watch the video.

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Heimat? ‘In a sense it means home, the castle in a person’s heart, if you will …. but in truth there is no specific English translation,’ to quote a character in Patrick McCabe ‘s story, The Sisters, in the collection Dubliners 100. Heimat, often translated as “home” or “homeland”, is a shared cultural concept among German speakers, conveying a deep sense of belonging which is difficult to articulate. In her novel, Beautiful Pictures of a Lost Homeland, Mia Gallagher shifts between borders and flight, evoking a lost “Heimat”. Impending Brexit provokes me to dig deeper into my Ulster Heimat. What does belonging to Ulster mean to me?

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Heimat – the place where the language of being comes naturally and you can read the faces and gestures of the people around you. Can unpacking “home” in the German word help with the sense of dislocation, aggravated for many by Brexit?

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The German word “Heimat” speaks to the mind, body and spirit of home and homeland. It has a myriad of individual interpretations but the question “What is your Heimat” elicits a response from every German speaker and has prompted me to explore in a series of essays, memoir and fiction what Heimat/HomePlace means to me.

What drew me back from mainland Europe to Donegal? Is it because Donegal is the place of my foremothers and forefathers and the opportunity of a site for a house? Is it the 21^st century shift of the Irish ideological tectonic plates? Is it the space to breathe deeper or to howl to the moon unfettered by the sparkle of city aspirations and celebrity success? Do the unequalled light and landscape feed my creativity? Is it the echoes of the past along the wild Atlantic?

A mix of all of these and more. Almost every hill has echoes of only lightly buried remains or heaps of stone which housed families of the last century. From my window I can see a hillock on the nearby beach where diggers of the 1990’s uncovered an ancient souterrain, used as a place of storage or retreat. On the advice of archaeologists, it was quickly buried again, so most beach visitors know not what they clamber over. It is one of many unmarked sites dating from the Iron Age and Bronze age in Donegal among some OPW designated attractions.  Homes and forts of the buried consciousness of the past give me a long perspective on my Donegal Heimat.

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Donegal’s fulfilled Ulster’s reputation for truculence with the only No vote in the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution. The 51.9 per cent of No voters is a sign of Ireland’s lingering bi-polar tendencies. Women like my friend, who have lived here all their 90+years, make it easy for me to have compassion and respect for the No Voter. I can afford compassion because of my relief that almost half of our voters in Donegal and almost three-quarters of those in the rest of the Republic of Ireland are part of the “quiet revolution” which is slowly taking us into the 21^st century. Yet in Ulster the majority hang on to deeply-held and polarised beliefs. Could more awareness of the “other” help move us towards common ground?

Perhaps in the 21^st century we will grow up as a country and explore what religion means to us and what it means to the “other side of the house”. Religion is not only about churches and clergy. There are strands of Catholicism, Presbyterianism and other religions, which stand for resistance and solidarity against the threat of suppression and/or the invasion of the mind, body and spirit.

When do belief systems provide help and comfort to our communities and when they do they fuel out-dated aspirations and fears? Can we dislodge Catholicism’s association with the view of Northern Ireland as “under British occupation” –  to quote a group of Donegal politicians in 2016? Debates over Brexit and the border can help us transcend out-dated bitterness and beliefs or lead us to pick over old wounds. It’s our choice.

The post Half-hearted Donegal first appeared on Margo Gorman.