Take a Tour of Colm Tóibín’s Ireland
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Don’t let the title of Oprah’s 105th Book Club pick fool you; most of Long Island takes place not in New York but in Enniscorthy, Ireland. After 20 years in America and a shocking betrayal, Irish immigrant Eilis Lacey returns to her hometown, where she is confronted with the ghosts of a life she could have lived had she never left—and might have if she chooses to stay.
These questions of homecoming and immigration—and the details of the town itself—are intimately familiar to the book’s author, Colm Tóibín, who himself left Enniscorthy to come to America. “My four grandparents were born in the town,” he tells Oprah Daily. “There was a feeling that you knew everybody.”
Tóibín captures this feeling viscerally in the novel, where community gossip, chance encounters, and familial histories all play enormous roles. While the book’s central plot is fiction, many of its key locations—from the brambly footpaths to the local pubs—are entirely real. The following photos offer a tour of Colm Tóibín’s Ireland: a place of timeless beauty, rich history, and deeply enmeshed community.
Much of the drama of Long Island takes place in the local bar in Enniscorthy that Jim Farrell—a character who finds himself at the hub of a love triangle with Eilis Lacey in both Long Island and its prequel, Brooklyn—owns and lives above. In a small town like Enniscorthy, the bar functions as the treasurer of the community’s secrets. “As soon as he was old enough to stand behind a bar and serve a customer,” Jim remembers his father warning him that “if he ever felt the urge to tell anybody anything, he was to stop and say nothing. No one appreciated a barman who talked too much.” In his pub, his father added, he would learn much more than he needed to know, and his job was to keep it to himself.
The author may have gleaned this insight from his own experience working as a barman in the summer of 1972. Tóibín was 17 at the time and, by his own admission, “the worst barman who ever lived.” His issues were not with keeping his customers’ secrets, however, but an even more foundational responsibility of the job: serving drinks. “My pints of Guinness were unholy,” he confesses. Even the vodkas he poured “had something wrong with them.”
Although Jim’s bar in Long Island is fictional, all the other pubs mentioned in the novel are real, including the one pictured. “Stamps is one of the main pubs in town” Tóibín says, and one that Eilis’s 16-year-old son, Larry, takes an immediate liking to when he visits from Long Island. “They don’t ask my age or anything,” Larry tells his grandmother. “And I can go on to another pub if anyone asks me too many questions. But most people are nice. They all want to know where I’m from.”
The region of Ireland where Long Island is set has “soaked up energy from its many invaders,” wrote the author in an essay for the Financial Times.
In the heart of Enniscorthy is a castle originally built by Norman invaders in the 13th century. Just like the wider region, the castle has fallen under numerous occupations. When the British statesman Sir Henry Wallop took over the castle, he wrote to the queen’s spymaster, “There is no way to daunt these people but by the edge of the sword.” In a piece he wrote for the Financial Times, Tóibín recalls “the dark laughter in the early ’60s when my father and a local priest, undaunted, bought the castle and made it into a museum—still open to the public—with, in the early years, many exhibits glorifying the struggle for Irish independence.” The castle still has a plaque, photographed above, in memory of Tóibín’s father, which recognizes him as the museum’s secretary and cofounder.
Tóibín’s father and the priest raised money to buy and restore the castle by hosting local dances, not unlike the ones Jim frequents in Long Island, in hopes of finding someone to fill Eilis’s place in his heart after her abrupt departure back to America.
Enniscorthy is located just inland from the Wexford Coast, in the southeast of Ireland. When Eilis returns to Ireland, she and Jim walk along the water, and ahead, there are “miles and miles of empty beach,” with “no sign of anyone” behind them. This is a far cry from the coastline she had grown accustomed to in New York, where “every inch of the beach” was taken up by sunbathers such that she and her husband, Tony, “had to step around people and then work out a way to circumnavigate the next group.”
This charming, verdant pathway to the Irish Sea is typical of the Wexford Coast, where, as Toíbín writes in his essay collection, A Guest at the Feast, “all the old houses” are “built in dips in the land to protect them from the wind and the rain. The locals do not care about sea views.” Looking back on his childhood, the author recalls how all along the coast there was “an elaborate network of lanes, rutted, with thick bushes and briars on the ditches, and all of them led somewhere, to remote holdings, whitewashed houses with red galvanized roofs, and a sheepdog barking as you approached.” If this photo, taken in 2023, is any evidence, things haven’t changed all that much.
From the peak of Tara Hill in Wexford County, one can see the whole of the region where the novel is set. Many of the characters in Long Island frequently travel from Enniscorthy to the nearby (slightly larger) Wexford town for dances or errands, as Tóibín did growing up. “For me, even still, Wexford town is a most exotic place. It had a Woolworth’s and a bookshop and a long main street,” he writes in A Guest at the Feast.
The road between the two towns, which the author can be seen walking in the photo above, remains one of the “most moving and resonant” settings in the world to Tóibín. “All of us have a landscape of the soul, places whose contours and resonances are etched into us and haunt us,” he writes. “If we ever became ghosts, these are the places to which we would return.”
Long Island, by Colm Tóibín
amazon.com
$24.64
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