Years ago, the Eagles sang about “Standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona”. Now I’m sure that the street corners in Winslow are fine examples of Western architecture and planning, but then so are the street corners of Butte, Montana and Ogalalla, Nebraska. So if you are reading this from an American perspective (which we’ll take as representing the landmass just over the horizon from the north of Ireland for the moment), then you might find it a mite difficult to imagine the rolling billows and all that which lie at the eastern edge of your landmass. In fact, even getting to the eastern edge of aforesaid landmass was beyond you until fairly recently.

And were it not for the pressures of emigration from a war-torn and starving Europe which took many of your forefathers in successive waves westward, many of my antecedents wouldn’t have got much further then their own townlands.

Indeed, and in my own lifetime, I have known folk from these parts who were born in the early part of the last century and never made it to Belfast, let alone Baltimore. Mind you, standing on a street corner of Tempo, East Fermanagh is not quite Eagles territory, but you get my drift.

All of which precedes the theme of Oceans, Reefs and Islands. Now Ireland is not big on the sort of reef which surrounds sun-kissed tropical islands, copiously littered with the wrecks of Spanish treasure ships packed to the gunwales with doubloons and moidores. We have reefs all right, but they tend to be submerged outcroppings of basalt which will rip your hull to shreds in seconds and scatter your cargo and cadavers all over the strand.

Not that the ocean floor is boring. Apart from a few centuries’ worth of fishing fleets and World War merchantmen, not thirty miles from here lies what was left of the German U boat fleet which surrendered at Londonderry in May 1945. The Maritime Museum in the town has photos aplenty of the weary crews doing their best to stand to attention on deck as the Royal Navy takes over. Having stripped every boat of anything useful, the Navy then scuttled the lot just off the Irish coast, presumably in a fit of pique at Ireland’s neutrality.

History, as the educated subscribers to this site know well, is full of irony. In this particular case, history proudly wears an Irony Cross because not only did the good citizens of Liverpool carefully resurrect a U boat from the Mersey estuary and make it into a tourist attraction (though they were less than amused when an unexploded 500 pounder turned up in the main channel last month), but the very jetty in Londonderry where the U boat fleet surrendered has now been replaced by the dock where the occasional German cruise ship moors. Plus ca change, mes braves.

The coasts of Ireland are scattered with wrecks and little museums full of stories of heroism and tragedy. It is one of history’s niceties that the Royal National Lifeboat Institution predates the partition of Ireland and knows no boundaries. Indeed, the nearest lifeboat station to my home town of Portrush (Northern Ireland) is actually across the Foyle estuary in Moville, Co. Donegal (Republic of Ireland). The sea does not ask for ID when it steals your earthly life.

You can see this for yourself when you come here. At one end of the island, you have the city of Belfast, cradle of the Titanic. It is said that Belfast lost its heart and its drive when the ship went down – and everything since has merely been the long sad goodbye to what might have been. As a Blue Badge guide, I often have to drive by what remains of the shipyard and tell the tales – “We’re just stopping to take on ice, Mrs Astor.” – and it is eerie to see the empty space which was once Harland & Wolff, shipbuilders, though the two huge yellow Krupps cranes remain and will remain for the foreseeable future. Ironically, German cranes mark the spot where the Luftwaffe tried to blitz the shipyard in May 1941.

The good news is that the port of Belfast is being re-born as a technology driven development and the city council is building a permanent exhibition to the ship, but us oldies will always hear the stamp of 20,000 pairs of boots echoing over the metal bridges as men “clocked on” in the morning and “threw in their boord” at the end of the day.

At the other end of the island, near the city of Cork, lies Cobh, once known as Queenstown. The old railway station has been turned into a wonderful heritage centre lying in the shadow of the town’s huge cathedral. Now you know – and I know – that heritage centres can be like the curate’s egg: good in parts. But this one is special. Not only does it tell the story of mass emigration during the Famine – an gorta mor, the great hunger – but it has the other statue of Annie Moore, the first person to be processed through Ellis Island.

You cannot, as an inhabitant of this island – whether you call yourself Irish, British or as O.Henry would have written and W C Fields would have intoned, a citizen of the world – you simply cannot have the privilege of sailing into the wonderful harbour that is New York without thinking of all those poor wretches who suffered the wrench of departure, the cancer of uncertainty and the tears of exile. Cobh tells it simply and elegantly – as it was.

And not only that, it tells of the last call of the Titanic and of the horrors of the Lusitania, just four years later. No-one who takes the time to read these stories walks out the way they were

But Ireland is not all gloom. Indeed, modern Ireland has outstripped most of Europe in its mad rush to catch up with the glories of progress – tailbacks, mortgages and needles - but there are still magic places to be explored.

The islands of Ireland are wonderful. Moving clockwise from the north, let us start with Rathlin, lying almost midway between Ireland and Scotland and controlling the approaches to the Irish Sea. Only 7 miles by 3 and surrounded by fast-flowing tides, Rathlin is reached by daily ferries, is home to 100 people, one pub and in June, to about two million seabirds, though I couldn’t be sure about the latter as all the census forms aren’t in yet and many of them are rather difficult to read.

Guillemots, razorbills, puffins and every type of gull on the planet screech and wheel around the west and north ends of Rathlin during the breeding season. And there are nearly as many ornithologists as seabirds, though the humans tend to go home at night instead of roosting on the crags and clifftops. May and June are just wonderful on isolated Irish islands – even if you know nothing about birdlife outside “Sex and the City.”

Moving southwards, we come to the Maidens, two outcrops outside the port of Larne. From both sea and air, the lighthouses look like the conning towers of submarines, which is why everybody bombed them in the Second World War. Then the Copelands, lying off the County Down coast and so on to Lambay and Ireland’s Eye, two wonderful landmarks just north of Dublin.

The west coast has a treasure trove of islands – the sharp-toothed Skelligs, to which the last guardians of Christianity retreated with their gospel manuscripts in the sixth century and which are still barely accessible to this very day. Then the Blaskets, farmed until the 1950s and the home of Peig Sayers’ stories. Scattery Island in the Shannon Estuary, with its round tower and monastic remains; the Aran Islands, guarding the entrance to Galway bay and home of that most mysterious of fortresses, Dun Aengus, and so all along the coast via Achill until you come to Tory Island off the coast of north west Donegal, an island which produced a breed of robbers so rapacious that they bestowed their name on the British Conservative party. Tory is still inhabited and attracts many painters looking to enjoy those almost limitless summer evenings and that very special light which hits at the existence of another, unseen world.

And when you have seen our islands and looked back home into the setting sun, then you will understand why those of us fortunate enough to criss-cross the Atlantic sometimes just head off to Capes Cod or Hatteras. You will find us there, staring out across the ocean at sunrise, thinking about what lies just over the horizon. This little green island, adrift in the Atlantic, unsure of its attachments to east or west, riven by history, driven by ambition. Home.