McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (3 page)

On a wall up the street a chalked sign outside a pub called An Siol Broin says: ‘Traditional Session—2.30—?’. Fine. A couple more pints, then a Chinese takeaway. Given its price, perhaps I should book Securicor to deliver it to the Hospital for Incurable Diseases.

It’s a small, one-room, nicotine-stained place, the bar itself on the wall to the left as you go in. It’s packed. Music’s playing at a table across to the right. There are kids weaving between the tables, to the sound of authentic-sounding diddly-di.

But the thing that hits you smack between the nostrils as you walk in is the fusty, fungal smell. I’ve breathed fresher air in a beer tent full of damp dogs at the Glastonbury festival. This is the strong whiff that goes with the tougher end of the hippie spectrum, the ones who regard incense and patchouli and essential oils as hopelessly effete. For years I thought that the earthy odour that emanated from them in tepees and at festivals and street markets was some sort of, well, earthy odour that was applied from a bottle or jar because they find it attractive. Though I have no conclusive proof, the balance of probabilities now suggests it indicates an aversion to showering.

At the heart of the whiff, five musicians on fiddles and guitars are playing a low-octane traditional tune, half-heartedly accompanied by two spaced-out fellow travellers on bodhrans, which is a hard word to spell, especially in smoke this thick.

You often get a diversity of social types, and sexes, at a traditional Irish session. Young players will watch and learn from their elders; but this group seems strangely uniform. The musicians are all men, for a start—thirty-something, dread-locked, bearded with varying degrees of success. At either end of the table, on the fringes of the men, sits a tribe of hennaed, multiply pierced, tattooed women with children in psychedelic face paints teetering on their laps. Other children play between legs and furniture, as is only right and appropriate in an Irish pub. The women are wearing loose-fitting Indian prints, and things with soil on, while the men are in matted jumpers and dead men’s waistcoats. One guy has had his beard braided. Everyone, of both sexes, is wearing chunky high-laced industrial boots.

And always, the whiff. Not the BO that surges down the airline cabin at you when British businessmen take their suit jackets off; not offensive, like that. But distinctive, certainly; as if unusual mushrooms were growing in rich compost in hidden crevices about their persons. It’s enhanced by the Samson roll-ups everyone is smoking. Drinks are high octane—Scrumpy Jack, Diamond White, Pils: welcome to the Oblivion Express.

And then, as I listen, I start to catch the accents: Manchester; West Country; south London; Manchester again; West Midlands. Christ, what’s going on? They’re all
English
.

The women all have pierced noses, but there is only one with dreadlocks. She has a non-English accent that I can’t quite identify through the music and the whiff. Maybe she’s Irish. Dublin, perhaps; or maybe Belfast? She’s in leggings, like the pregnant twenty-year-old in the tie-dyed vest next to her. Leggings. Bloody hell. Imagined by fatties everywhere to create a slimming effect, they make the average body look like a sackful of hammers. The music stops for a moment, and I catch her accent. She’s Dutch. Probably brings an old school bus full of Samson over on the ferry every time she goes home.

I notice how kind she and her friend are being to the children, who are having a great time. But I find myself wondering if, in their way, these kids are growing up with just as blinkered a view of reality as we did; and also, whether it isn’t a tad dark and smoky in here for them? I have to remind myself that I’m an inveterate, possibly prosecutable, taker of kids into pubs. Suitably chastened, I head for the bar.

Because of the time and care lavished on the pouring of a pint of stout, the trick in Ireland is to order your next one five minutes before the previous one is at an end. That way there’ll be no uncomfortable drinking hiatus; but it takes a day or two to become reacclimatised to this. While I wait for the half-poured pint to settle, I get talking to the guy next to me. Mancunian hard knock; two ear studs; powder-blue eyes; feathered hair longer at the back than on top, in the manner of rural New Zealand, or vintage Rod Stewart. A mullet, I believe it’s called, which seems hard on the fish.

He tells me he’s an ex-roadie for Manchester bands, and asks me do I know the roadies’ mantra? No, I don’t.

If it’s wet, drink it; if it’s dry, smoke it;
if it moves, screw it; if it don’t move,
sling it in the back of the van.

He’s gone before I can ask him how they come to be here. Were they hounded out by Thatcher? By police, after one of the Stonehenge set-tos? Are they just music fanatics? Inheritors of the bucolic English Wordsworthian rural tradition?

Or is it just easier to get the dole over here, as Bridie, the Irish mother of a friend of mine, insists, from her position somewhere to the right of those nuns who keep putting crosses up outside Auschwitz? ‘Peter, the lanes behind Dunmanway are full of them! Dirty, filthy creatures, living like tinkers, growing drugs! Sure, the country’s being ruined by the English, going over there to collect the dole and get drunk! They should stay in their own country.’

She tugged her beard aggressively, clearly unaware that this was what the English had been saying about her and the rest of the immigrant Irish for the last fifty years. She is an unreconstructed Vatican literalist, with a pinched little mouth like a cat’s arsehole, who considers every post-De Valera Irish politician to be a pagan reformer more deserving of hellfire than Boy George, but I can’t help liking her.

A few years ago, I’d had cause to visit the lanes at the back of Dunmanway, in West Cork. I was taking gifts from friends of mine in Brighton to their mate Dominic, who had turned Crusty and gone to live in an old gypsy caravan by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, with a baby son called Merry. We drank poteen from a Tizer bottle hidden in the ditch. I’ve got some photos, but I haven’t shown them to Bridie. I’ll wait for the right moment; like when she’s pinned to the ground by a heavy object and the emergency services haven’t arrived yet.

I drain my pint, and think I might try and spend some time with the hairy men, and women, of Dunmanway in a few days’ time, when I’ll be over that way. Perhaps they’ll be able to shed some light on why the English Crusties have moved into Ireland in such a big way. Is it cultural homage to the Irish way of life? Or Cromwell’s last revenge?

I take one last look round before I go. Perhaps this is what it’s like now. Perhaps middle-aged baldie men in tweed jackets don’t play traditional music any more. Ireland’s modem now. Maybe I’m out of touch. I’m certainly almost out of cash. Only ₤15 left in my wallet. Just enough to have some prawn crackers with the noodles, if I’m lucky.

As I go through the door, a bloke from Bristol starts singing ‘Kevin Barry’.

The Whiff.

It’d be a good name for a band.

Ireland’s not a cheap country.

In Dingle, County Kerry, in 1993, I was once charged 99p—at that time, more than an English pound—for a single leek. But there are some bargains still to be had. If you shop around, you can hire a car for a week and still get change from a grand. So I’ve hired one, a bog-standard repmobile with all the up-to-the-minute features, like a radio I can’t work, and I’m heading west out of town, past the airport, towards Bandon and Clonakilty. I might visit my family in Drimoleague, but not just yet. And I’d like to spend some time with the Crusties out the back of Dunmanway, but not before I’m bored with hotel showers and clean linen. I have a vague notion of tracking down some obscure stone circles; but mostly I just want to try Ireland on for size, and see if it still fits. Sometimes it’s good just to get creatively lost. A sense of purpose occasionally has its place when travelling, but for the most part it’s seriously overrated.

I hitch-hiked this road once as a teenager, and got a lift from a farmer in a brand-new Jag. There are no hitchers today, though .Come to think of it, you hardly ever see people hitching any more, especially in England. Motorway services always used to have about a dozen people queuing for rides, mostly students, or men holding a set of red trade number plates to prove they were truck drivers, and therefore more deserving of a ride than students.

But people stopped hitch-hiking sometime in the 1980s, after somebody in politics or the social services put about the malicious rumour that all hitch-hikers would be chopped up in picnic areas by serial killers. So these days young people get the coach instead; a sly piece of social engineering which prepares them for less eventful and more predictable lives, unless they get the seat next to a serial killer who doesn’t own a car.

The farmer, by the way, had taken the back seat out of the Jag, and filled the space with two milk churns, some animal feed, and a small sheep. He’d dropped me in Clonakilty.

Clonakilty today is a picture-book Irish town. A few years ago all the houses and shops on the long, narrow main street were repainted in the reds, greens, yellows and blues that can be seen on the new generation of tourist postcards. These bright colours are the new vernacular in a country where once everything was grey. In Clonakilty they’ve had time to weather down a bit, and are now just on the vivid side of garish.

It’s a delightful place, famous for its black pudding, which is available at many outlets along the street. Let’s face it, it’s ubiquitous. You can probably get it at the solicitor’s, and the Natural Health Centre. No sign of anywhere to get Singapore noodles, though with décor like this, I’d estimate they’d have to sell for at least eight quid. I walk through the town to the West Cork Museum, where I’ve heard there’s some Michael Collins memorabilia. The museum is in a small old schoolroom, and is resolutely shut; so I go for a half of Murphy’s in De Barra instead.

De Barra is a bar famous for its traditional Irish music sessions. There are lots of pictures on the wall of the landlord being hugged by men with impressive beards and jumpers. I sit at the bar with the
Examiner
: WHY JAPAN IS GOING GA-GA OVER ALL THINGS GAELIC. ‘ “I think Irish music closely resembles Oriental music and so people in Japan can identify with it,” says Yasui Takashi, a member of Eiri Na Greine, a Japanese Irish band which gigs in the Shamrock Bar in Shinjuku, Tokyo, twice a month.’ I’m reminded of the time I visited Lapland and stayed at the Ice Hotel, where everything—walls, bar, beds, floors, chapel is made from ice. It melts every spring, and is rebuilt in the autumn. On the Saturday night there was a dance. Huge quantities of beer were brought in, the cans covered in reindeer skins so they wouldn’t freeze. The band came on in furs and moon boots, and launched into ‘Whiskey in the Jar’, in Swedish. They billed themselves as ‘Lapland’s Top Irish Band’.

I ask the barman if there’ll be music tonight.

‘Ya, sure. The Noel Redding Band.’

Who?

‘Noel Redding. Ya know. The fella out of the Jimi Hendrix Experience.’

That’s what I thought he’d said. So what on earth is Jimi Hendrix’s bass player doing playing in a pub in Clonakilty, on a Wednesday in March, thirty years after Jimi died?

Poor Jimi. A lot of people say it must be a terrible death, choking on your own vomit; though it strikes me as I watch the guy at the bar next to me eating thick vegetable soup, that it’d be a lot worse to choke on someone else’s.

Out on the street I stock up with a smoked chicken sandwich and a bottle of water (‘As pure as Our Lady’s wimple’) at a deli, and head off into the sunshine west out of Clonakilty towards Rosscarbery. West Cork is among the finest of Irish landscapes; not wild and melancholy and majestic, like Connemara and Mayo and Donegal, but undulating and welcoming, lush green fields rolling like waves down to the sea, always just a mile or two to the left off this road. Thanks to EC subsidy, the main roads are excellent and well signposted; but as soon as you turn off it’s like going back in time, a maze of conflicting signposts (where there are any), and mileages with all the accuracy of a builder’s estimate.

Just before the causeway that carries the road across the estuary at Rosscarbery, I spot a hard-to-spot sign leaning at a drunken angle and pointing to the right, north off the main road: ‘Michael Collins Birthplace—2 miles’. Well, why not? A sharp U-turn that takes me first on to the grass verge, then nearside wheels down into the ditch, then up over a boulder—after all, it’s what hire cars are for—and I’m off into the deserted back lanes that carry no clue that Ireland’s biggest industry is now tourism.

Remarkably, I don’t get lost, and after a distance that turns out, uniquely in my experience of Ireland, to be indeed two miles, I find Michael Collins’s birthplace. As with all Irish historical monuments out of season, there’s no one else here. The site looks out on beautiful open countryside, rising towards a nearby hill. Next door, a man is gardening outside a modern house. There are no other buildings. All is silence.