McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (11 page)

‘Anyway, if a building’s been up five years and there’ve been no objections, you can get retrospective planning permission.’

He works as a thatcher all round Cork. There aren’t many people left who can still do it. People come and watch, he says, and want to talk about it, and about the past that’s disappearing. His kids are in the village school—one of the women from the mountain is a teacher there—and this is home now, for good.

‘But do you feel you belong?’

He pauses and smiles. ‘Well, I’ve no family links so I’ll always be an outsider. We’re a community within a community, I suppose, but I can live with that. They’re good people, the Irish.’

The kids are reading, or watching cricket on the TV. I ask their dad if he’s going to Danny’s party at all.

‘I’m getting a bit old for that sort of thing. Think I’ll stay in and watch a video tonight. Would you like more tea?’

I drop Dominic at the foot of the lane leading up to Danny’s at around nine thirty, and head back to Dunmanway. I’m starving, but by the time I park in the square, it’s well after ten, and my best bet might be to hit the hostel and devour whatever the paedophile and the cyclist have been naive enough to leave in the fridge. Mind you, the Shamrock Bar, facing the square, looks inviting. I’ve a vague notion that I might have been in there with Uncle Jack on market days. A board in the window says, ‘Lunches served, 12–2.’ I’m eight hours and twenty-five minutes late.

Inside, the lights are dim and mercifully there’s no TV, no juke-box, no Van Morrison or Shane McGowan or Saw Doctors, just the gentle hum of about twenty people talking to each other. As the landlord lets my pint settle, I say I realise there’s probably no chance of food at this time on a Saturday night.

‘I could do you soup and a sandwich, if you like.’

‘That’d be great.’

‘Hang on, I might do better than that.’

A quarter of an hour later he arrives at my table with a huge plate of hot chicken and ham and cabbage and potatoes. It’s the Auntie Annie memorial dinner, on Saturday night, at twenty to eleven, in a pub that isn’t serving food. I go back to my caravan a happy man.

The wind builds up and rattles the shutters, and the rain starts to come down, but I feel secure inside the caravan. It’s a bit like going camping for the first time as a kid, and enjoying the sound of rain on canvas, knowing it can’t reach you. I sit up and try to read a history of Dunmanway I’ve found on a shelf in the hostel, but find myself preoccupied by the present.

I’m struck by the strong sense of empowerment of the people I’ve met, by the control they’ve taken over their lives. It seems to me that if they’re rebuilding ruins, and repopulating an area devastated by emigration, there’s a good case for saying they should be subsidised rather than persecuted. And—if you leave Catholicism out of the equation—you can see them reverting to the values that much of Ireland has hurried to leave behind in the last thirty years. It’s a basic, hands-on way of life, where crops are planted and dug, old machinery is repaired or cannibalised for parts, wells must be dug, roofs somehow kept on.

I’m sure that, for some older Irish people, this dirty-finger-nailed, electricity-free existence is an unwelcome reminder of a past they’ve left behind. Yet most people seem happy to accept them. No one points in the street any more. Scruffy? Noisy music? Parties? A weekend on the drink? It’s not exactly unknown round here.

I find myself reading and rereading a page about Dunmanway’s origins as an English plantation, and realise that, in a sense, history is repeating itself. Those immigrants were rapidly absorbed. This new generation have made a life as a separate community; but gradually, through work, music, pubs and school, they are being integrated. Crucially, their children see themselves as Irish, and within a generation or two their English antecedents will have melted away. Heritage tourists will be taken up to the mountain to see the strange old houses. ‘This is where English hippies used to live,’ the guide will be able to say. ‘It’s all Irish here now.’

As I turn out my electric light, an eerie screech cuts through the night: a fox or bird, perhaps. Or one of my fellow hostellers crying out in ecstasy. I get up to fasten the lock on the caravan door, but there isn’t one.

The next lunchtime I head over to Danny’s place to say goodbye to Dominic. There’s a campfire smouldering outside, but no one’s dancing to the drum ’n’ bass that’s booming from a small marquee that’s appeared since my last visit. A handful of people are sitting round, sipping hot drinks and looking partied out. Dessy is asleep, or dead, on a cart. But the kids seem to have as much energy as ever. A twelve-year-old is teaching a seven-year-old to fire-juggle. It seems to be going well. Neither of them is on fire yet, at any rate.

I’ve got to know Dominic better than I ever did in England, and I admire him for making something positive and unusual and right out of a life that at one point had seemed to be going nowhere. Over the weekend, a lot of his friends have said they envy me my family links, that my ancestors give me a real connection with this area. And maybe there’s some truth in that; but I can’t help feeling Dominic has made a deeper connection.

He’s standing at the top of the lane as I drive off. With his weathered, lived-in face, his thick tweed jacket, rough pants, big boots and flat cap, he doesn’t look like part of some English subculture any more, but like what he’s become: an old-style countryman, doing his best to raise a family, make ends meet, and have a good time, on a wild patch of Irish ground.

‘So, Liam, what river do you think Luxor stands on?’

‘Er, the Danube?’

The sun’s shining and the gorse is blooming as I head back towards Cork airport. A day shy of two weeks and I finally manage to override the perpetual search mode on the repmobile radio by pressing the same button I’ve been frantically jabbing at for a fortnight. One day someone will reinvent twiddling a dial to find channels and be hailed as a technological genius.

The decline of the Catholic Church’s influence in the last two decades has coincided with the rise of the phone-in on Irish radio, where a nation confesses its darkest heresies and most startling sexual unorthdoxies to a new priesthood of silver-tongued disc jockeys. Radio confers a cathartic anonymity, and a sense of self-justification, that can’t be had from confessing the same stomach-churning filth to a steely-hearted alleged celibate in a Saturday night confessional, while your neighbours sit in rows outside, adjusting their underpants and trying to listen.

‘Now, Kathleen, you’re on your way to Sligo for your twenty-first. Can you tell me who wrote ‘
The Importance of Being Earnest?
’

‘Er, Ernest…Ernest…Ernest Hemingway?’

These days, you can normally rely on Irish talk radio for an engrossing catalogue of out-of-court settlements for testosterone-crazed bishops, or guilt-ridden farmers owning up to serial gusset-twanging with semi-literate babysitters. Instead, I’ve got round two of the morning quiz. And the Sixteenth Rule of Travel says:
However Exotic the Country, the Local Radio Phone-in Quiz Induces in the Traveller a Sudden and Dramatic Downturn in the Will to Live
. But passing through Bandon half an hour from the airport things take a turn for the better, with news of a plan to put a great big light on the top of Croagh Patrick, Ireland’s holiest mountain up there in County Mayo. The light would shine out across the world, or at any rate Mayo, as a symbol of Ireland’s faith. The organisation behind this controversial plan turns out to be a bloke called Gerry, who seems to have it well thought through.

‘So, Gerry, have you thought how you’ll be getting the power up there?’

‘Well, we’ve considered all the possibilities, like, but the best way will be if we dig a trench there, right up the side.’

‘A trench up the side of Croagh Patrick, Gerry?’

‘That’s it, yeah.’

‘So have you talked to the fella with the digger yet?’

‘Er, well now, I’ve got me own digger, y’see.’

‘So what’ll you be putting up there on the top of the mountain then, Gerry? Will ya—’

‘Just a, y’know, a great big light, like.’

‘Will there not be a burger bar or some other kind of refreshment outlet?’

‘Ah, sure, no, just a picnic will be nice.’

‘What did St Patrick have to drink up there? Do we know that, Gerry?’

As I pull into the airport poor Gerry’s taking a terrible drubbing from enraged listeners accusing him of blasphemy, congenital idiocy, and ignorance of the fact that the top of Croagh Patrick is under cloud ninety per cent of the time. Gerry’s morale goes into free fall, perhaps because work on the sacrilegious trench has already begun, and he’s thinking it might be quite hard now to go back and fill it in. Maybe he’s already bought the electric cable.

I park the repmobile in a potholed wasteland among dozens of its clones and head for the terminal.

Apart from once absent-mindedly eating a whole packet of stale crisps in the Dar es Salaam departure lounge before looking in the bottom of the bag for crumbs and discovering it was full of live ants, I can think of few travel experiences more depressing than returning a hire car to an airport dealership. The desk will be unmanned as you approach, because the partially trained company representative has seen you coming and hidden behind the counter in the hope that you’ll drop the keys in the box and go away. This way they can post you a pre-paid credit card slip, which is infinitely preferable to standing there watching your reactions as you read the bill.

After standing my ground for two or three minutes, a young man suddenly pops up from underneath the counter, feigning surprise. According to his label, his name is Ruaraigh; and he’s very red. Either he’s already embarrassed at the answers he’s about to give me, or he’s got someone down there with him.

‘Ah, hiya, heh, didn’t see you there just now. Looking for some fax paper. Can I help ya at all?’

Standard industry practice then prevails, as Ruaraigh denies all knowledge of my, or the repmobile’s, existence, and elaborately fails to find the paperwork.

‘Sorry about the delay there, Mr McCarthy.’

I’ve already done the mental sums on this one. Thirteen days, call it two weeks, at what was it? Twenty-two pounds ninety-live pence a day. Say £165 a week. Add on some tax, and there are always some insurance extras the bastards haven’t told you about, £380, say £400 tops, which still seems a lot for cheap seats, no central locking and pariah status, but there you go, that’s the world we live in.

‘Here it is now, Mr McCarthy. Sorry about the hold-up, like.’

But instead of a simple invoice saying ‘Car Two Weeks 400 quid’ the printer is pummelling out unfeasible columns of figures on, at the last count, three sheets of corporate paper. It’s taking on the look of the extras on a Keith Richards hotel bill. As the machine runs out of puff, Ruaraigh rips off the account, detaches the side perforation and glances at it, before passing it to me with a nervous grin.

‘Jeezus, Mary and Joseph, that can’t be right!’

The anguished howl comes from nearby, where a big woman in a state of shock, and inappropriate velour leisurewear, has just received her bill at the ironically-named Budget counter. I glance down at mine and feel physically sick.