I was there for January; we started in Galway and did a semi-circle around to Dublin. The North was quite a contrast to the Republic, but not in the ways I assumed it would be.

In Galway I met a woman who pointed out to us that the Irish are romanticized ("Irish Irish Irish fairies fairies fairies Guinness!"), period, which I'd never considered before but which is really true when you go look for it. And...yeah. I tend to identify imaginatively with history fairly easily, but in both the Republic and the North it wasn't even necessary to use my imagination to see the history of violence; it's written on the landscape and in the people and is plain to read. (One story: We were driving along the seacoast in the northwestern Republic one day and Tony up at the front of the bus got on the mike and told us that this was the bay in which the IRA blew up Earl Mountbatten and his grandson on his boat in 1979. Oh.) Which is a roundabout way of saying that having even an inkling of the suffering that violence and disaster entails on the people who live in that place kills my ability to romanticize the violence and disaster per se, anyway.

And, yes. Apologies are vital, but they are only one component.