Irish Decameron

In autumn, 2019, when the People’s College Choir was invited by the Irish College Leuven in Belgium to headline its 2020 celebrations for St. Patrick’s Day, the choir members had never heard of coronavirus. They certainly had by March 10, 2020, the night of their final rehearsal in Dublin. By then, social protocols urged people: do not shake hands; do not touch the face; and do wash hands.  Social distancing wasn’t yet a “thing,” and self-isolation was something reported from China, Italy and Spain.  The World Health Organization did not yet think the planet was in the midst of a pandemic.

As a precaution, some choir members did cancel their Belgian trip. The majority, however, decided to go ahead with long-anticipated plans to travel to a little-known but fascinating outpost of Irish culture. The College’s tradition of hosting Irish visitors stretches back more than 400 years.  St. Anthony’s College was established in 1607 as one of the Irish Colleges that, in the wake of the Tudor persecutions of Catholic Ireland, trained Irish priests.  That same year, the Franciscan monks welcomed Hugh O’Neill and the earls who had fled Ireland following the Nine Years War. O’Neill and most of his retinue continued their flight to Rome, but many remained in Leuven. During the 17th century religious wars, the Irish in Leuven helped defend the ramparts of their adopted city.

The college became renowned for scholarship, most particularly the Annals of the Four Masters, a compendium of early Irish history that has framed how we think of the Gaelic and medieval past. Today the Irish College Leuven continues the tradition of scholarship and learning.  The choir arrived…

…to find they were sharing the facility with scholars attending an international symposium on biochemistr.y. After settling in, the choir members headed out to find lunch, and enjoyed the ambiance of a sunny spring day in a university town. 

The streets, pubs and sidewalk cafes were buzzing with people – no thought back then of social distancing; just don’t shake hands! 

But apprehensions were rising quickly.  That day, Thursday, March 12, the WHO declared a pandemic. The following day, Leuven’s municipal government would order the pubs and restaurants to shut down as of midnight. 

At the Irish College, the biochemistry symposium dispersed. What was the choir to do?  Having already spent a day together in the close confines of an Aer Lingus flight, the Dublin and Brussels airports…

…a 45-minute bus ride to Leuven…

…and a hotel reception area…

… the choir decided that staying together for the rest of the weekend would not add significantly to the risk they had already encountered. They went out to enjoy an evening meal on the night before the restaurants were closed.

And as happens with the choir when they’re let out on the town, the evening ended with a singing session.

At the Irish College, they found themselves alone with the staff in premises built to accommodate much larger numbers, with enough victuals to feed a symposium. They enjoyed the hospitality of gracious and generous hosts.

That evening’s St. Patrick’s concert, with a trad band and the Irish author, Danielle McLaughlin, was cancelled, but for the choir, the show would go on.  They performed in the Grand Auditorium in full dress:  black gowns with red sashes for women and black suits with red bow ties for men. 

The choir outnumbered the family members and Leuven Centre officials who comprised what Musical Director Paul Walsh described wryly as “a small but discerning audience of invited guests.”

A YouTube video shows the audience joining in heartily for the concert’s final number: a singalong version of “Molly Malone.”

The concert programme combined well-known Irish standards like “Molly Malone,” “Danny Boy” and “Down by the Salley Gardens” with less-familiar Irish pieces such as “Slán cois Máige” – a song of exile and longing by the 18th century Irish composer Aindrias Mac Craith. The choir introduced a 2014 composition, “Trí Trua na hÉireann,” in which the young Irish composer, Aran Corcoran, sets to music the 1976 poem by Pádraic MacSuibhne. It deals with three sorrows of Ireland:  abortion, homelessness and the Troubles. The choir did not restrict its repertoire to Irish music only. 

The performance included Renaissance era pieces in English (“Ah Robin, Gentle Robin”) and in Latin (“Non Novis Domine”) as well as an African American spiritual (“I’m Gonna Sing.”)

The Irish choir was far from home and, like the storytellers of Boccaccio’s Decameron, they passed the time together, apart from the community. In the 14th century Italian classic, the plague exiles tell stories. In Leuven following the concert, the travelers gathered around a long table to sing songs…

and recite poetry.

They reprised the session again the following night.

Saturday morning, they proceeded with plans to tour the Flanders battlefields and the nearly-empty streets of Ypres.

During the First World War, the Irish battalions had marched through Ypres’ Menin Gate on their way to the trenches.

The names of soldiers with no known grave are inscribed on the gate’s walls, including men from many Irish regiments. (Here are the names of the missing-in-action from the regiment in which my grandfather served in 1914-5.)

The tour included the Ireland Peace Park at Messen, which commemorates all soldiers of the island of Ireland. Divisions from both the north and south had fought together at Messines Ridge.

Many of them are buried at the nearby cemetery at Lone Tree. 

Reproductions of German trenches have been built on the Messines ridge, but with the shutdown of public museums, the facility was closed to our group.

The tour also made a stop in St. Julien where, at the Second Battle of Ypres, the 1st Canadian division withstood the first gas attack, and held the line against the German attack. For Canadians, this is holy ground.

The following day, Sunday, the choir flew home from an eerily quiet Brussels airport.  The Thursday of their arrival, the airport had been as busy as the sidewalk cafes of Leuven. The departure day, Leuven’s streets were empty, the shops, pubs and restaurants closed.

Still open, however, was the chapel of St. Anthony where lie the remains of Father Damien of Molokai, the Belgian saint who dedicated his life to helping the leper colony in Hawaii.  The chapel provided a sombre place of reflection about the heroism of otherwise ordinary people who commit themselves to a life of service. Within a week of returning to Dublin, it was the front-line medical workers, the shop workers, the postal workers, and truck drivers who also provided examples of courage in difficult times.

That Sunday morning, the google feeds contained videos of revelry in the crowded pubs of Temple Bar the night before.  By the time the choir arrived in Dublin, the Irish bars had been closed. In the following days, new protocols for social distancing and self-isolation were introduced. Everyone settled in at home to wait out COVID-19, and think back on a wonderful weekend of poetry and song that managed to ride ahead of the wave of pandemic.