McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (27 page)

That’s the trouble with Ireland. It can give you unrealistic expectations.

Dingle and Dunquin were the first places I ever heard Irish spoken as a first language. In 1972 it still felt extremely remote. Word was that many local people had been scandalised by the immoral carryings-on of the
Ryan’s Daughter
crowd—women and tequila being airlifted in for the weekend, that sort of caper. Change was in the air, but this still felt like an outpost of the old Ireland. There were tourists of course, but they were hikers, anglers, cyclists, archaeology boffins, all come for brutal red-cheeked watery-eyed outdoor pleasures.

Walking the streets the next morning, it’s clear that things have changed. The town itself—a few streets of traditional houses, shops and pubs, clustered around a lovely harbour—still looks the dream Irish town that visitors hope to discover. And increasingly, more and more of them are doing just that. The anglers and outdoor fanatics are now outnumbered by gaggles of affluent, retired European couples in mint-condition leisurewear, wandering the streets and looking for something to do. They seem to quite like it here, but they’re a bit tentative, as if they were expecting something bigger, with more facilities, and aren’t quite sure why they’ve come.

There’s a highly visible tourist infrastructure now, which isn’t something you could have accused the place of in the past, and a sense that where things used to be random, they’re now far more calculated. The town seems to be on the cusp of a change, midway between its former status as a remote, backward fishing port and its future destiny as a chi-chi Celtic holiday resort. New restaurants, new paint, new windows abound. Long-standing establishments like the cap shop I was looking in last night are beginning to look like anachronisms, surrounded by restaurants called La Bohème, clothes shops called Tír na nÓg, and a plethora of places to satisfy all your candle, crystal and druidic jewellery requirements. There’s also a worrying number of shops displaying kitsch souvenirs—leprechaunalia, shamrockovia and other assorted paddywhackery.

It’s like the man said last night. I blame that feckin’ dolphin.

Some time in 1984 a young dolphin began to appear in Dingle harbour. Unusually for such sociable mammals, he was always alone. He started visiting every day and was soon christened Fungie. Word was out among the New Age and hippy communities, who came down to bond with him. It wasn’t long before he was marketed to the mainstream, and a raft of Fungie-related cottage industries grew up around him—boat trips and swimming sessions and wet-suit hire and books and photos and hostels. Suddenly Dingle was no longer remote. It became a Destination, recommended by all the
Rough
and
Lonely Guides
, with a marketing strategy, and an increasing sense of organised craic.

When you think about it, it’s remarkable how reliable Fungie has been, turning up on cue every day for fifteen years for people to photograph and swim with him. For a wild dolphin, this is exceptional behaviour, and also very good for business. I can’t quite banish the lingering suspicion that there’s a guy who dresses up in the dolphin suit every day. The bottom will fall out of the tourist boom once he decides he’s too knackered to do it any more. If they’ve any sense, they’ll already be training up a replacement. There was a Dutch guy with very muscular arms in De Valera’s this morning, who wanted to know if he could have fish for breakfast. Maybe it’s him.

I spend an hour browsing in an inviting little bookshop. There’s a display of works on local history and archaeology and culture, but no local blockbusters or high-profile fiction set in the area. It can only be a matter of time before towns in the tourism business start realising that literature, like cinema, has huge marketing potential, and start offering inducements to authors to use them as a setting.
Harry Potter and the Dolphin of Dingle
.
Hannibal Lecter—Silence of the Dolphins
.
Angela’s Dolphin
. That’ll pull the crowds in.

I pick an Irish novel called
Father’s Music
by Dermot Bolger, which is partly set in Donegal, where I’m headed. As I go to pay, a teenage German boy and his mother are being served. She is buying him a large hardback omnibus of Sherlock Holmes stories.

‘I am already reading these stories in German,’ says the kid proudly. He seems to be addressing his mother, the bookshop owner and me as a group. At the Stuttgart Akademie for Gifted Adolescents, I’d say he’d be the one with the flushed neck who always had his hand up first. The bookseller has one of those rip-the-date-off calendars with a little motto for each day of the year. The German prodigy is staring at it.

‘This date is wrong.’

‘What?’ says the bookseller. He blinks once, as a subliminal vision of him battering the kid with the Sherlock Holmes book and cracking his skull like an egg flashes before his eyes.

‘The date is wrong. It is still yesterday.’ The prodigy gives an incredulous chuckle that anyone could be so disorganised, while the bookseller fixes him with a psychopathic glare. Instead of kicking her son on the shins with her hand-made orthopaedic shoes, Frau Prodigy is grinning with pride and encouragement.

‘Look, I will change it for you.’

The kid rips off yesterday’s date and throws it to his would-be killer, like a fish to a seal, or a dolphin. As he and his mother leave, I’m reminded of Hans, the Beara taxi driver, and the mutual incompatibility of the Irish and Teutonic attitudes to time. I decide to show the bookseller that I understand this and I’m on his side.

‘Shall I rip this page off too, so you won’t be having to worry about it tomorrow?’

Nothing. Not a flicker. He hates me as much as he hates the kid. He was probably a mellow, happy-go-lucky soul once. Tourism can do terrible things to the human soul, especially once dolphins get involved.

Back on his pitch outside the post office, John Mills is doing a little dance for two Italian couples in overpriced anoraks. He greets me as I pass by. ‘Welcome to Dingle. Are ya enjoying yer holiday?’ Clearly he has no recollection of me, or of the fact that just a few hours ago he was possessed by the spirit of my grandfather, but I suppose that’s the paranormal for you.

I buy a smoked salmon sandwich and a bottle of mineral water which, astonishingly, has been imported from Canada. Clearly corruption on a massive scale must be involved if someone is flying bottles of water from Canada to the wettest country in the world and still making a profit. I drive a little way out of town and have lunch looking out over the ocean, in gentle sunshine. There’s a report on the radio about ex-Taoiseach Charlie Haughey and the mounting allegations against him of outrageous scams, disappearing cheques, and unexplained property acquisitions, including his own island off the Kerry coast. Despite all this, says the reporter, the town of Dingle has granted him free mooring rights for life, because he starts their regatta each year. I drain the bottle of water. Maybe Charlie had something to do with importing it. Perhaps he’s mixed up with Singapore noodles, too.

After a read and a doze and a stroll up a hill to a lichen-covered stone with mysterious markings on it, I figure it’s late enough in the day to take a drive around the coast to Slea Head and the Blasket Sound. I’m guessing that the coach trips, family outings and
Ryan’s Daughter
anoraks ‘do’ the peninsula earlier in the day; and it turns out I’m right. It’s turning into a lovely evening, and I have the western edge of Europe completely to myself.

The short journey from Dingle via Ventry Harbour to Slea Head and Dunquin is the most affecting landscape I have ever seen in my life. I remember being awestruck on my first visit all those years ago; and though the road has been widened in places since then, and new houses built, it still touches me in the same way. It’s like a mythological place. Tiny enclosed fields run down dramatic mountainsides and are farmed to the cliff’s edge, before giving way to a dazzlingly multi-hued Atlantic. Hedges are scarlet with fuchsia. In several places, just above the road, are the beehive huts—the remains of the stone shelters occupied by monks and hermits in the early days of Christianity. You used to be able just to wander into them, but now there’s a weird jerry-built shed in which a woman and a sinister dog are lurking to sell you tickets. I’ve become so used to Ireland’s random scattering of antiquities that a ticket would spoil the magic, so I pass by.

On a sharp bend in the road looking out to the Blasket Islands is a life-sized tableau of the crucifixion. As the sun disappears briefly behind cloud, then reappears, there is a dazzling display of light on water. Great Blasket Island seems to come in and out of focus, as twinkling sunbeams bounce off the waves, surrounding it with shimmering haloes. It’s so clear that, way off to the south, the Skelligs are visible, shimmering on the horizon like an illusion. As I stand at the cliff s edge, a spontaneous, non-specific wave of emotion surges up inside me. I don’t know where it’s directed or why it’s happening, only that it feels unconditional. A tear wells up in my eye.

I try to understand why this is happening, because much as I love West Cork and the fields where I played as a child, it doesn’t have such a physical effect on me. Perhaps it’s because Dingle was the place I visited the first time I came to Ireland alone, without my mother and father. Maybe it’s conjuring up a lost and carefree youth. I don’t believe it made me cry then, though. It’s probably more likely that I’m just having an everyday mystical experience; so why not relax and get on with it? After all, how often in your life are you confronted by a landscape whose beauty makes you weep?

Suddenly there’s the sound of a car approaching. It’s a hire car, one of those ugly, grey, rounded Mercedes mini people-carriers that appear to have been squashed at both ends. It slows down to second, so that the couple in it can take a quick squint at the view; and then…the window opens, the woman throws a crisp packet out, and they drive off.

I feel violated. The moment has gone. A once-in-a-lifetime experience, the moment of mystical union with nature—the moment that Wordsworth spent so many years and so many stanzas banging on about—has been destroyed in a flurry of prawn cocktail-flavoured debris. The bastards. Perhaps, like Wordsworth, I will be able to recall the moment in tranquillity and solitude, and gain insight and solace from it; but right now, my instinct is to chase them, force them off the road, and stuff the bag back through the window. There. Now look what’s happened to my tranquillity.

I drive on, weighing up the feasibility of ramming them over the edge, but they’ve disappeared into the distance, and I convince myself it would be a good idea to calm down. I drive past an old cottage. The door is open and through it, on the wall, I can see a picture of the Sacred Heart; on a bench outside, in wellies and cap, clutching a walking-stick, is the old boy who’s probably lived there all his life. Twenty yards away, outside the next cottage, a couple are unloading suitcases and wine from a car with French number plates. The next time I’m here, the old man will be gone and there’ll be another holiday home to rent.

I pull over a little further along and take a walk on the cliff top to the Ryan’s Daughter commemorative stone. You’ll know you’ve found it, because it says ‘
Ryan’s Daughter
Commemorative Stone’, and nothing else. The beach immediately below was the setting for the famous gun-running scene in the movie. After its release, there was a rush of tourists wanting to see the houses, the main street, and the schoolroom. In fact, a replica village had been specially built a mile or two away to serve as the set, but I don’t think they told the tourists that.

When I was first here, Dunquin was a handful of old unadorned cottages and farmhouses. Today it’s grown into a village of modern bungalows, sprinkled up the hills and along the roadside. I find myself regretting its modernisation, so I stop and try and make myself see sense. I have a compelling argument to put to myself. I listen to it carefully.

Twenty-five years ago there was no sign of this new prosperity. The young people were still leaving, and though the old houses might have been picturesque to an over-romantic outsider, they can’t have been much fun to live in. Now, it’s grown into a community, with new buildings, new people and new initiatives. Why shouldn’t they enjoy the comforts of synthetic modern building materials if they’re going to live perched on the windswept cliffs of the most westerly village in Europe? If in the process a sense of the ancient, the timeless and the mysterious is lost, then it’s a price worth paying.

By the time I set off to drive back to Dingle, I’m half convinced.