Tahir Masood (Rafa’el)
Foreign Correspondent, Ireland
In the southwest of Ireland, along the wild Atlantic coastline, lies a county of unmatched beauty and poetic stillness—County Kerry. Known for its lush green fields, ancient stone walls, rugged peninsulas, and a people whose hearts are as generous as the landscapes they inhabit, Kerry is a place where nature and tradition still walk hand in hand. It is here, in this quiet corner of Ireland, far from the pace and pressure of city life, that I unexpectedly found a version of happiness I never knew I needed—and a renewed sense of self.
Coming from a life shaped by both movement and uncertainty, I did not expect to find solace in a place I had never heard of growing up. But Kerry met me not with grandeur, but with gentleness. It did not demand anything of me. It simply allowed me to arrive, to breathe, and to begin again.
Ireland itself is known for its poetic soul, its love for music, literature, and storytelling. But Kerry, in particular, feels like its spiritual heart. The people here are warm, unhurried, and deeply rooted in their land. They smile with their eyes, offer help without being asked, and carry a kind of ancient calm that seeps into your own being the longer you stay. It was in this land of rain-washed roads and turf fires that my literary senses awoke again—words began to return to me not as noise, but as meaning.
In Dingle, a small coastal town in Kerry where the sky seems to stretch into forever and the ocean sings ancient songs, I saw what draws people from around the world—Americans, Europeans, and seekers of something quieter. They come for the dramatic cliffs, the musical nights in intimate pubs, the taste of fresh Atlantic air. But they stay, I believe, because Dingle teaches something: how to live without hurry, how to feel without distraction, and how to be human again.
Happiness here isn’t loud. It isn’t a celebration or a possession. It is in the small moments—a neighbour waving from across the field, a child playing barefoot in the rain, a stranger who doesn’t remain a stranger for long. In Kerry, happiness is not something you find. It’s something you notice—once you slow down enough to feel it.
Psychologists like Jean Piaget remind us that our relationship with the world is formed early, shaped by how we experience love, loss, and learning. But some places, I believe, can re-parent the soul. Kerry did that for me. It reminded me that joy does not require achievement—only presence. It taught me, as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote, that healing is not about forgetting pain, but about transforming it into wisdom.
Yes, science explains happiness through chemicals and psychology. But Ireland, and especially Kerry, explains it through living. Here, happiness is found in silence, in slowness, in sincerity.
As the Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney once wrote:
“Once in a lifetime / the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up,”
but perhaps what also rises here, quietly, is something just as vital—peace. A sense of belonging not to achievement, but to the earth, to people, to time itself.
So I leave you with a question, not as a writer but as a witness:
What if happiness was never something distant to pursue, but something quiet, familiar, and already close—waiting in the ordinary, asking only to be seen?
