Jaywalking with the Irish (14 page)

Where oh where had my own protective Paddy hat gone? A ride on a golf cart is supposed to be a tame affair, but the one I found myself enjoying a couple of weeks later should have been kitted out with some form of helmet and perhaps a parachute and crampons. A sheer cliff dropped 250 feet into the ocean from about four feet to my right and the treacherous gravel path was suddenly veering in that godforsaken direction as well. Why was I here? An American magazine had commissioned an article regarding the ultimate Irish Xanadu, the spectacularly situated and steeply priced golf course on the Old Head of Kinsale.

Jim O’Brien, the unflappable manager of the place, was at the wheel, proudly pointing out the sights as I held on for dear life. The surf roared below us, and a squall fluffed and vanished a few miles off, close to where a German torpedo rent the
Lusitania
on May 7, 1915, sending 1195 drowned passengers floating toward the Old Head, and the U.S. careening into World War I.

“Look there,” Jim said, jamming on the breaks and pointing to an opening in the cliffs that was surrounded by countless bickering gulls. “It goes from one side of the head clear through to the other. There are fifteen caves out here that do the same thing.”

Among other things, the Old Head is a national bird sanctuary, home to untold thousands of Arctic skuas, stormy petrels, great and sooty shearwaters, pomarines and hoopoes. It is also an isthmus of stunning beauty upon which generations of Cork people used to freely walk and picnic, a natural treasure that spreads into some of the most stunning and storied vistas that can be created by water, stone, and sun. In 1989, Jim’s boss, a tough and controversial Kerryman called John O’Connor, bought the whole shebang from a local farmer for about £225,000 and, despite agreeing otherw
ise with the local planning authorities, began to seal off public access to what rightfully should be an Irish national park.

Jim led me to the dilapidated remains of a seventeenth-century “brazier” lighthouse – only three others exist in Ireland – which once featured open fires on its roof. “It was later said to do service as a whorehouse,” he laughed devilishly. “Some of our guests have asked if we could restore it to its former glory.” And the wallets and attitudes that come with those visitors make it possible that they were not joking.

Back by the Old Head’s narrow neck, one could see the crumbling remains of a twelfth-century stone tower that once reigned over a castle belonging to the Norman de Courcy family who called this place home for centuries. Somewhere close by supposedly lay the ruins of an Iron Age fortress called Dun Cearmna, which the course’s brochures link to the mythological origins of Ireland. The claim is that it was the home base of the second-century B.C., pre-golfing Erainn tribe who gave the country its name, although Ptolemy’s map reference to that crowd was as vague as would be expected for a man who never set foot on Ireland’s shores and couldn’t handle a mashie or wedge.

Jim drove me along fairways that looked yummy if you happened to be a golfer or a cow, and chortled on about various visits by American celebrities, senators, and athletes, including Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, and the billionaire emperor of a Florida garbage-hauling and video-shop kingdom, Wayne Huizenga. Here slept a purported fairy circle; here on the rocks below a certain putting green, the steamer the
City of Chicago
split in two in 1912. Scattered every which way around this fantasy land were newly propped up imitations of ancient Irish standing stones: Disney Ireland.

In the clubhouse, a low-slung, glassy, stone-faced affair that looked like it belonged in California’s Malibu, the guest-book glowed with epiphanies. “If God were to come back as a golfer, this is where he would play,” someone had scribbled. The Creator golfs? I wondered. Even the hoariest parts of the Old Testament had not revealed the universe to be this perverse. I looked out at the lighthouse’s white tower shimmering from the end of the headland, doubting that the spiked and spangled shoe crowds had a clue
about how bitterly their privileged play went down with the local Irish who have been banished from this hollowed peninsula, and branded anew as “foreigners,” just as the British had labeled every Irish-speaker in these parts only two hundred years ago.

“We’re pretty much targeting an American audience,” Jim had confided over lunch, when I asked about the greens fees that run to US$250 a round, or about ten times the going rate in the rest of the country. It was clear that this enterprise had deliberately tried to price itself beyond the reach of almost anybody with a native Cork lilt.

“One of our plans is to foster enduring connections with the Old Head through lifetime international memberships, which will be priced at fifty thousand dollars,” O’Brien offered, saying “dollars,” not punts, nor pounds.

What about the helicopters we’d seen roaring over Kinsale to hurry time-pressed executives in for their mashie bashes around the Old Head? “Americans don’t like to drive on our narrow roads,” Jim explained. “They find them slow and dangerous.”

The pursuit of leisure was definitely getting frenetic: forty choppers a day now crisscross Ireland to bring golfers to their expensive tee times at such places, what with the number of visiting linksters exploding from fifty-two thousand a year in 1988 to a quarter of a million today.

But things can get worse: Jim’s boss hopes to begin ferrying golfers in by blazing-quick motor launches, once he completes a planned £15 million luxury hotel on a parking lot in the heart of Kinsale. Meanwhile, another group was floating plans for a local £40 million pleasure palace, including not only a lavish swimming pool but also an ice-skating rink, on a spectacular greensward outside of town. The famous Australian “White Shark,” Greg Norman, backed by a group that includes a former U.S. Senator, was meanwhile finishing off his own spectacular $30 million course on the coast of County Clare. This one came with a luxury hotel and enough holiday homes to double the size of the local village of Doonbeg, from where one can kiss the Clare ambience goodbye. The same kind of theme-park reality is now scheduled for one of the finest estates in Kildare, the grand Carlton House,
which belonged to Edward Fitzgerald, leader of the ill-fated 1798 United Irishmen rebellion, inspired by the recent American and French revolutions. If that hero could have envisioned the crowd about to traipse his lawns, he would have shipped himself off to Timbuktu.

But there was an uplifting aspect to my journalistic exploration of this new Celtic world, for being armed with a provocative story in Ireland, especially one potentially redolent of fresh dirt, is a ticket to introductions and inside-conversations without end.

“It’s the greatest regret of my career that we did not manage to purchase the Old Head as a national park. We had the opportunity to do so, and failed,” lamented a senior Cork planning official who refused to be named. From bureaucrats, naturalists, and lifelong begrudgers, I heard chapter and verse about how O’Connor’s “Ashbourne Holdings” had systematically cut off the dawn-to-dusk free public access that had been specified in the planning agreement. The outfit had demanded insurance fees from would-be strollers, then insisted upon identification cards to prove that candidates for a walk were official ornithologists, whale watchers, and the like. Finally, the head man just told everyone without a pocket full of greenbacks to bugger off.

One day, I joined the magnate in a Cork restaurant that is struggling to ape the trappings of power-lunch hot spots in London, Manhattan, and modern Dublin. John O’Connor proved to be as big as John Wayne and just as blunt, with thinning gray hair covered by an American baseball cap. Outwardly unaffected for a man who owns a lavish hundred-acre seaside estate in Kerry, he was sporting a polyester windbreaker that wouldn’t have cut mustard at Augusta or Pebble Beach. He ordered a glass of wine and then followed this with a bottle, as a table full of cronies waited like fawning courtiers a few feet away.

“Creating that course was the golfing equivalent of building the Channel Tunnel,” O’Connor offered, his blue eyes studying me hard. “To start with, every tree hugger in Europe tried to shut us down,” he added, and began reviewing the lawsuits he had to battle right up to the high courts of the European Union. O’Connor maintained that the public never had any legal right of access to
the Old Head. “Golf courses were considered an agricultural use of the land when we started, and not subject to any planning council stipulations, so you can’t rewrite the rules,” he insisted.

O’Connor then related how his landscapers trucked in three-quarters of a million cubic meters of topsoil from up to thirty miles away, plus nearly 300,000 salt-resistant plants from California and New Zealand, along with giant stone-pulverizing contraptions from ski resorts in the French Alps, to improve drainage on the hardpan of the Old Head.

“It was a labor of pain,” O’Connor said wearily. At that moment, his mobile phone rang with a call from his neglected imps at the next table. He cracked not a smile, saying that “98 percent” of the golfers who visited what he liked to call his “national monument” were foreigners, but saw no difficulty in the irony in what to him was simply a matter of running a successful business.

“We have discovered that the public and golfing don’t mix for safety reasons,” O’Connor said, alluding to several incidents in which casual walkers had supposedly been injured by careering golf balls. So, after eight hundred years of foreign domination, famine and pestilence, the Republic’s gravest dangers were golf balls falling out of the sky?

No answer.

The story kept opening conversational gates, especially in Kinsale. “It’s abysmal. I was walking on the Old Head all my life and now no local can get in,” said the bespectacled Brian O’Neill, who presides with his mother, Mary, over one of the most unspoiled pubs in town, the Tap Tavern.

“It makes you think of Nazi Germany, with the barbed wire and the guards,” complained a wizened customer by the tavern’s glowing coal fire. A retired pharmacist complained that his letters to the county council demanding the restoration of public access to the headland were exercises in pissing in the wind. How a supposed “national monument” could become a no-go area for local citizens was a subject that evoked outspoken spontaneity in an otherwise often whispering populace. It felt as if everyone was focusing for the first time on the brutal toll being exacted by their nation’s new infatuation with wealth at any cost.

“He’s been in here, alright,” Mary, the fiercely independent, white-haired co-owner of the Tap Tavern, said of the Old Head’s impresario. “He had a bunch of his cronies with him one night and set his eye on that whiskey there,” she pointed toward a bottle high on a back shelf, whose amber contents were glowing under a small blue-shaded lamp. The label said Academy Whiskey.

“It is a fine and rare whiskey that has not been distilled for eighty years,” said Mary. “But himself had the cheek to say to me, ‘Mary, we would like a drop of that Academy Whiskey now.’”

“‘You certainly will not. It is not for sale,’ I told him.”

Her son Brian smirked.

“‘I’ll give you ten pounds for a taste of that whiskey,’ says he, showing off,” Mary, looking a tad malicious, related.

“‘You won’t,’ I told him. But O’Connor is a big man, so he offered twenty and then forty. ‘It’s not for sale,’ I repeated.”

“It must be good stuff,” I said, not revealing that I by now knew that the developer frequently sauntered into the Blue Haven Hotel around the corner, expecting to be handed a fat cigar and bottle of fine wine on a silver tray at every appearance.

Mary grew heated. “He had all his friends around him, and was playing the big shot, so he said, ‘I will give you five hundred pounds for that bottle of Academy Whiskey.’”

The look in Mary’s eyes would have made stray cats run for cover. Two centuries ago, Kinsale, like nearby Bandon, was so thoroughly English that they forbade the outlying Paddies from so much as lingering on the town’s streets. To the casual visitor, the place may look like a theme park willing to assume any shape that will please outsiders. But it is not yet so. The locals nurse bitter feelings about anyone who tries to tell them where they can and cannot go, even if they hail from points as close as Kerry.

“I said to him, ‘John O’Connor, for all your riches and your golf course and your grand Kerry castle, you do not possess enough money to buy that whiskey from me. It is not for sale to anyone, and especially and most of all not to you.’”

With that, Mary crossed her arms in a harrumph, and disappeared into a back room with a mop.

Return to beginning of chapter

We were heading into the Irish season that is best spent in bed. By December, the dreary light made its feckless appearance around nine o’clock in the morning, glowing with all the joy of wet ash, and then began stubbing itself out about six hours later. Meanwhile, the rain hammered down, now without cease. Somehow, Laura roused herself in the blackness two and a half hours before dawn, dressed, breakfasted, and woke one or the other groaning parent for a lift to the bus station that was often still peopled with walking detritus from the night’s previous indulgences. At least somebody in the family was moving with purpose.

Even the car grew sullen. By now, its white roof had taken on the appearance of a petri dish coated with green slime. A turn of the key set the drowned carburetor wheezing like an emphysemiac grabbing at the rails on their bed. The moment the family settled themselves inside the car, every window became so steamily opaque with condensation it was impossible to see the road. Then again, our flagstoned garden walk and children’s swing set had become coated with their own dank green films, while mushrooms sprouted beside the shower, and the slugs or snails or whatever they were at our door stoop – those will not be described.

Some visitors to Ireland become so demented by the wintry darkness and damp that they actually believe it promotes health, as the meticulous naturalist, historian, and nutter Charles Smith, M.D., testified in his account of his extended tour of southwest Ireland in 1774:

More true to our perception was a Ray Bradbury story about a drenched planet upon which the sun comes out for a few hours once every seven years, and where a girl was locked in a closet for a few hours and sadly missed the only chance she would have in her entire childhood to see the splendor of full daylight. It must have been penned in Ireland. Jamie’s visiting brother and his wife saw about fifteen minutes of sunshine during a ten-day stay. We dutifully drove them this way and that around the bucolic countryside, not one field of which could they discern through the deluge.

“Ireland’s so green and lush, so why are there no cows here at all?” demanded the extroverted sister-in-law, Gayle, a North Dakota farm girl herself, at a neighborhood party given by Shaun and Breda Higgins. It is almost impossible to silence an Irish celebration, but this did it, exciting universal guffaws in a country that still remains among the most agriculturally oriented in Europe.

“If I were to stand on my roof, I could see them when the weather is fine,” said Shaun. “The only reason you can’t see them from the roads now is that you can’t see thirty feet.”

A malaise seemed to take over the island. Among the most disgruntled were the secondary-school teachers who shut down the nation’s schools for seventeen days carefully selected around peak
holiday and weekend points in order to inflict maximum inconvenience upon parents, the object being to force their demand for an immediate 40 percent pay rise. Railroad and airline employees joined in the fun by squelching those essential services, so the taxi drivers decided “why not us too?” Worse, the bartenders in Dublin threatened to stop working. At last some government ministers concerned with labor issues broke their silence and said enough is enough, that the me-first avarice of this era could spell Ireland’s downfall if people did not curtail their ever-increasing demands. Two months later, the ministers quietly voted themselves a 28 percent pay rise.

Numbering ourselves among the church-shopping class of modern Catholics, we kept trying out different outposts of solace. A strange one on Cork’s Washington Street laid out its possibilities on a printed entrance-hall sheet, in a language reflecting its proximity to every major solicitor’s office in the town.

Having not yet retained legal representation (which is a good idea the moment one sets foot on Irish soil), we could scarcely figure out the prescribed sequences of praying in that place. It seemed simpler to attend services at a nearby church, but that didn’t prove very uplifting either, seeing as the priest, who had recently been brutally mugged, drifted his eyes during services to some spot on the altar’s wall where he seemed to be struggling to make sense out of what had become of Ireland. In this chapel, one prayed for the tender of the flock.

The season’s grimness evidently had some agitating effect on our secret admirers. One dismal morning we walked out to discover that our car’s rear window had been smashed to bits during the night. New chipper filth was strewn across our lane, and the Opel’s lichen-ridden fenders looked suspiciously cleansed as if the nuisances had been working again at their Olympian talents in the pissing department. This was more than enough, and, nearly thrashing the phone against the wall as I dialed, I demanded that the
gardaí
please show their faces at last.

The nearest comedians should have been rung up instead. After a leisurely interval, a couple of somewhat distracted individuals in uniform showed up at our door, foot scuffling and weather analyzing, then taking statements, and with a little flourish of connectedness, proffering apologies for the disorder in their precinct, while promising they would look after us now. Gazing out the window perhaps an hour later, I was elated to see one of the miscreants being beckoned to a slowing cop car. For a second, his eyes narrowed with concern.

“Jamie, watch this! They’ve got him!” I cried, nearly whooping.

“What do you mean? ‘Got him?’ They’re laughing like old friends,” she growled. Sure enough, our young friend had an arm casually resting on the police car’s door; chastened he did not look.

That night, I set out for surveillance on our dark lane. Suddenly, I found myself surrounded by a teenage pack swollen with new recruits. Testosterone hung in the damp air. This was discomforting, because the Irish art of vigilante score-settling runs deep, and
because the night’s group was also bulked up tonight by someone who was a good six inches taller than myself, who proved to be: The Brother.

Oh my, but did The Brother talk, speechifying about what a blissful youth he had spent on this same cul-de-sac where there was never any trouble nor foreigners like us, and about what a harmless fellow was yon sibling, just look at him in his innocence – there in the black of night where he may or may not be smirking.

Dangerous the scene appeared; six chipper-stoked digestions does not make for good odds, without the potential for a Cuchulainn triple salmon flip out of trouble – and yet, I quickly discerned something decent about The Brother. He in fact listened thoughtfully, and hearing truth in my complaints, even promised that my family’s troubles would cease. We shook hands, and after a long moment of consideration, I put out my hand to each of the boys, telling them in their turns that, having been a teenager once myself, I would gladly forget everything if we could just move on. And so, and verily, was peace made . . . for a time.

Nonetheless, the chop in our lives was not altogether smoothed. It soon became apparent that Jamie’s quest for employment was moving no faster than the strike-ridden public transportation whose plenary indulgences seemed to have long since expired. Her searches of the help-wanted ads uncovered S & M-sounding openings for “guillotine operators,” “Arctic drivers,” “rigid drivers,” “panel beaters,” and “abattoir” (slaughterhouse) workers, along with an insatiable demand for “I.T. specialists.” It seemed that the most interesting and creative jobs all lay in Dublin, which was three hours away by train, when those were running. This did not help. There were evenings when she was downcast, and she let me know it well.

It was challenging, having so many aspects of our identities in flux. Anxiety and conflict increased. Not for nothing did Jamie’s favorite song become Stephen Foster’s hauntingly beautiful Appalachian/Irish crossover tune, “Hard Times Come Again No More.”

I told a fellow customer in a downtown pub about my wife’s frustrations and formidable, if ignored, abilities. The man, who ran a successful local business, listened closely. A passionate socialist, he often proclaimed his desire to help the entire human race. Sip. He hated suffering of every kind. Puff. He hated capitalism. Clink. Religion, too. Sure, and let’s sip. He believed in the fundamental goodness of mankind and would dedicate his life to assisting same. Glug.

“Have your wife call in the morning, and we’ll talk,” he said, outlining a position he would soon need to fill. Natch, he didn’t answer the next eight phone calls. But this of course merely underlined the first rule of adjusting to life in Ireland – never, ever, believe any promise that is made in a pub.

This business of communicating in Cork was clearly very tricky. We were speaking the same language as everyone around us, but missing a certain inaudible nuance. Some friends finally explained that ours was a “who do you know” problem, that a secret grapevine ripples through every section of the island and that we had not yet established a personal identification code for gaining access to it. Quite simply, we were unknowns. The Irish like to deal with knowns, gossiped-from-head-to-foot knowns. If you want a plumber or a mechanic or a visitation by just about any human being who can stand upright in Ireland, you better have a name to mention – an influential solicitor, a distant cousin, or a friend of a friend of a friend – or you will officially be regarded as nonexistent. We hadn’t comprehended that we did not yet fully exist, which is a peculiar problem to confront after nearly five decades on earth.

“How can we possibly know that you are who you say you are until six months have passed?” the bank employee had asked, obviously in earnest. Owen McIntyre confirmed our suspicions. He railed that the entire nation should be prosecuted for collusion in restraint of free trade, that supremely qualified native-born individuals with impeccable credentials garnered overseas were routinely frozen out of good jobs for the same “who-do-you-know” problem. An eccentric local poet scoffed, “Don’t you know that
perestroika
has never made it to Ireland? Think of how the Russians
do business, with cash envelopes and veiled threats used to move every transaction forward. They’re ten times more open than us. Try Russia, you’ll find more opportunities there.”

One day, we had an American-born neighbor in for tea, despite his protestations that he was only free for fifteen minutes. He stayed for ten times that, so much did he have to say about the exasperating, impenetrable, inscrutable, obstinate, obdurate, duplicitous, fawning, feigning, deceiving, and plain curious nature of Irish communication he had been puzzling over for the last five or six years since marrying his Cork wife. It had taken him ages to land a low-paying job in a nursery school, despite having lengthy experience in the same line in the States. Rough going, he warned, lay in our path still – but he swore it was somehow worth it.

Another time, we met an English tourist who did not hedge words. “I’ve been here for three weeks,” he said, “and been mind-fucked every night. But I’ve never been laid once.”

Somehow, the kids for their part were adapting more smoothly. Laura was off to weekend sleepovers in grand country houses, while the boys worked on their continuing transformation into Cork street urchins. Owen fell into the requisite lilt. “I will, yeah,” he’d say when asked to take out the garbage, pronouncing “will” as if it had three Es while insisting that we call the stuff “rubbish” and its destination a “wheelie bin.” Alas, as much as he loved studying Irish in school, he became too self-conscious to don the Paddy hat anymore.

In Connecticut, the kids would by now be sledding, skiing, and gliding across frozen ponds. In Ireland, their element was mud. Harris, called “dirt boy” for similar proclivities as a toddler, took to the stuff passionately, wrestling down anybody within arm’s reach in our garden to ensure that they were both filthy within seconds. One night, however, the children at last got to taste an Irish version of their former wintry element. A traveling theater troupe flung magic over an otherwise dreary evening in the old market square called Cornmarket Street. Hoary characters on stilts and in dragon suits emerged from the blackness to the roar of eerie electronic music, while hundreds of children watched in rapture. Suddenly, a huge fan-like contraption blew torrents of white
Styrofoam flakes over the crowd. The children raised their hands in wonder as the stuff spilled onto their hair and down their necks. It was just as Ray Bradbury had described in his story of that other meteorological transformation when the sight of the never-before-seen sun shocked witnesses. Then the machine coughed up its last flurry, and the mist wrapped its forgetfulness back around the night.