McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland

McCARTHY’S BAR

A Journey of Discovery in Ireland

Pete McCarthy

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS
ST. MARTIN’S GRIFFIN NEW YORK

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

McCARTHY’S BAR. Copyright © 2000 by Pete McCarthy. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

ISBN 0-312-27210-3 (hc)

ISBN 0-312-31133-8 (pbk)

First published in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton, a division of Hodder Headline

20 19 18 17 16 15 14

To Irene, Alice, Isabella and Coral
and to Margaret and Ken,
for taking me there

The harp player had just fallen off the stage and cracked his head on an Italian tourist’s pint. There was a big cheer, and Con the barman rang a bell on the counter.

St Patrick’s Day, and McCarthy’s Bar was heaving.

The Eighth Rule of Travel states:
Never Pass a Bar That Has Your Name On It
. Other rules include: No. 7,
Never Eat in a Restaurant with Laminated Menus
; No. 13,
Never Ask a British Airways Stewardess for Another Glass of Wine Until She’s Good and Ready
; and No. 17,
Never Try and Score Dope From Hassidic Jews While Under the Impression They’re Rastafarians
, as someone I know once did on a Sunday afternoon in Central Park.

There’s an excellent P. McCarthy’s at the top of the main street in Westport, County Mayo, where they once made seventeen cheese-and-onion toasties for five of us, all on the same toaster, and never grumbled. I also like Pete’s Pub in Boston, Massachusetts, full of second-generation Irish postal workers still arguing about JFK and Nixon; or at least they were the day I spent the afternoon there and the barman gave me his shirt—a very selfless gesture, I thought, especially for such a fat bloke.

But I’d chosen this McCarthy’s to spend St Patrick’s Day in, even though it was just a plain surname, with no P in front of it. I’d invested ₤149 in a three-day, two-night St Patrick’s Day package from London Gatwick to be here, tempted back by hazy memories of my first visit, when I really had just spotted the sign, obeyed the rule, and walked in off the street.

Turned out Con the barman was from Skibbereen, just eight miles from where my mother grew up. There was a comprehensive collection of Irish matchboxes from the 1930s and 1940s, and one of Roy Keane’s Manchester United shirts in a glass case behind the bar. The grainy old wood and dusty stained glass were full of character, and that was just the harp player’s spectacles.

I’d been lured here this time by the dread of spending another St Patrick’s night in the Home Counties of England. Each 17 March brings to a head the inability of the English middle classes to deal with the Irish Problem, in the sense that Ireland is a problem because it exists. This is when the radio phone-ins, and the letter columns of local newspapers, are taken over by the Knights of St George, the League of Anti-European Loyalists, and other assorted flag-fetishists and embittered headcases.

The gist of their bile is that, despite a glorious empire, two World Wars, the Falklands, Margaret Thatcher and a Queen Mother who has retained an impressive capacity for gin and Dubonnet well into her nineties, the English refuse to celebrate St George’s Day. No one knows when it is; and in any case, St George is also claimed as celestial patron by Alsace. So it’s just not fair that we let all these paddies make such a fuss for the Irish saint, who was Welsh anyway; and while we’re at it, how come we let Irish people who live over here vote, instead of locking them up? After all, it’s not as if the Irish are just Catholic. They’re Catholic
and
pagan, and that’s just not on.

So some time in February—the worst of all months in England, when the desire to hibernate or flee is almost uncontrollable, and feelings of deepest malice towards Australians and their weather well up whenever the cricket highlights appear on the telly—the thought struck me. Why not get away this year for Paddy’s Day? Why spend a feast-day—one that carries echoes of my earliest childhood memories—in an English pub, drinking overpriced Guinness and listening to Van Morrison’s
Greatest Hits
, when for just ₤149, according to the weekend papers, I could do exactly the same thing in an Irish pub, only in more convivial company?

I briefly considered New York, with its green beer and good-natured, ruddy-cheeked, homophobic Irish policemen; or Dublin, with its rich literary heritage, and its scores of English stag parties throwing up on the streets of Temple Bar. But, deep down, I knew it had to be McCarthy’s. After all, it had my name on it.

Well, it was a fine evening. At one point the harp player fell off again, only backwards. And what a cosmopolitan crowd we were. As well as the Irish and the English, there were Americans, Italians, French and Scots, some sinister, well-heeled Russians, and even a couple of Hungarians—all agreeing loudly in half a dozen languages that the craic was indeed mighty.

It must have been some time after eleven when I realised that, in a profound and very real way, Con the barman was my best friend, and quite probably a close relative. It was important he should know what I really felt. So I told him I didn’t feel English.

‘You sound English to me, sorr.’

‘But it’s what you feel inside that counts, Con. In here! And I…’

I knew it was important somehow to convey that this wasn’t the drink talking; that I meant it, and what’s more, I’d still mean it the next day. So I grabbed him and shouted.

‘I…inside I feel Irish. I know where I belong!’

To emphasise my sincerity, I knocked a drink over.

‘Ah, that’s great, sorr. Good luck to ye now.’

Outside, I stood under the green neon shamrock and looked up at the sign. ‘McCarthy’s,’ it said. ‘Hungary’s Top Irish Pub.’

I turned up my collar. Budapest can still be quite chilly in March.

Sod this, I thought. Next year I’ll go to Ireland.

A year later, and I’m on the plane to Cork.

In a cold sweat.

The man across the aisle from me has a menacing aura, and a dog-collar. He may be a priest, but something about him—the way he seems to threaten violence even while asleep, perhaps—makes me suspect him of being a Christian Brother.

From the age of ten, I was taught by the Christian Brothers: the carrot and stick method of education, but without the carrot. My first school report said: ‘Peter is an unpleasant and frivolous boy who talks too much and will never make anything of himself, but he does take a punch well.’

At primary school, before the Brothers, it had been the Sisters: six impressionable years trying to work out whether nuns had hair. Curiously, both the convent primary schools I attended have now been turned into pubs. And the Christian Brothers, for their part, have a make of brandy named after them. God moves in mysterious ways, especially after a few drinks.

From an early age it was taken for granted that Jesus was Catholic, God himself was Irish, and I had been born into a wicked, pagan country. On St Patrick’s Day you could spot all the kids from Irish families wearing huge bunches of shamrock on their blazers, in a proud display of religious and cultural heritage that also made fights much easier to start. Though my dad was English, half-Irish counted as Irish when the insults were flying.

We lived in the industrial north-west, in Warrington, where the air tasted of detergent from the soap-powder factory, so at least you knew it was clean. The rugby league team was called the Wire, after the town’s main product. The Brothers’ school was eight miles away, in St Helens; a town so devastated by heavy industry it made Warrington look like an area of outstanding natural beauty.

I went abroad for the first time when I was twelve.

We’d been going to Ireland every year since I’d been born, but Ireland didn’t count as abroad. It was much nearer than London, or Bristol or Newcastle or Edinburgh for that matter, and was regarded simply as an extension of home. But in my second year at the Brothers’ school we went on a school trip to proper abroad. To our twin town.

To Stuttgart.

I’ve never really approved of the idea of twinning, because places are invariably matched with other places just like them. So if you live in, say, a stunningly beautiful medieval town with a perfectly preserved castle, or a glamorous seaside resort with a fishing harbour and miles of sandy beach, then you’ll be twinned with your exquisite European equivalent. And if you live in Warrington, or St Helens, then you’ll be twinned with another industrial casualty.

Like Stuttgart.

So having spent the first dozen years of my life surrounded by wireworks, glass factories and chemical plants, I found myself transported to a place where the high spot of the visit was a trip to a ball-bearing factory. To make matters worse, I contracted hepatitis. I lost a stone in a week and turned yellow, which is quite interesting when you’ve twelve. So the doctor arrived—a rather severe-looking elderly German gentleman in wire-framed glasses: not the most reassuring sight in the world when you’ve spent the last term doing a project on Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death.