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At one time I didn’t think, but now I definitely do think, that the pleasantest way of seeing Ireland is from a seat in a bus. I do not mean one of those eight-day bus tours, conducted and excellent and comfortable as they may be, I mean the couple of hours spent bussing from one country town to another. [So announced Lennox Robinson in an article first published in the Irish Press and later in his compilation I sometimes think (Dublin, 1956). He would possibly have been amused to know that bussing has another meaning nowadays when students get together in a college dorm. Robinson was not inspired by some of the women who joined his Tullamore to Banagher and Birr bus. Now read on.]

If you travel in a friend’s car, you are cribbed and confined, he or she has to make talk with you and you have to return the ball of conversation; a train nearly always looks for and finds, the most poor and uninteresting country to travel through, and when it reaches an interesting town, Portarlington, for instance, is careful to stop a mile away from the place, John Gilpinish.

But a country bus swirls along, is very swift, and yet can be leisurely, picks up a parcel here and delivers a bundle of papers there.

We are, back in the old coaching days : the conductor knows everyone-or nearly everyone-and has a friendly word for each on-comer or down-getter. He sets down Mrs. Maloney at the Cross and helps an old Jack who is off to spend the day, his pension-day, in the town: yet he can be severe and inexorable on the question of accepting bikes.

I am beginning slowly to fall in love with the midlands slowly, because there is nothing tempestuous or flashy about them. The vivacity of Kerry and Donegal, the cuteness of Cork and Antrim-these are lacking, and instead there is a lovely autumn-afternoon placidity, golden and Veronese-woman-like atmosphere. The very names of sleepy; they are bees in August Lime-trees: Birr, Clogher, Ferbane, Clara, Mountrath.