McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (32 page)

I have a sudden vision of Davey at this moment, curled up in a threadbare armchair, inconsolable, gazing into the cinders of a long-dead fire. Thirty-six thousand feet above the Atlantic, Kirsty is biting her thumb and weeping on her mother’s shoulder, while one of those terrifying American air-hostesses tries to take her lunch order.

‘Fish or chicken?’

I once made the mistake of asking how the chicken was done.

‘Hey, it’s airline food, okay?’

I can’t sit here feeling guilty for ever. I have to go to Galway to see a priest.

I wonder how he’s been coping since the twins were born?

‘I’ve met the most dedicated, wonderful Christian Brothers. I also feel that it was an aspect of cleverness to be able to avoid falling into the clutches of the more wicked Brothers. Only the dopes got caught.’

Since I’ve been on the road to Galway, some of the dopes have been phoning up the radio station. They seem a bit miffed that a former civil servant is suggesting it was their own fault they were sexually abused, because they were thick, and their teachers were horny.

‘There were a couple of bad eggs among the Brothers: wicked, cruel devils, and I’m pretty certain there was a bit of sexual carry-on, but what would you expect from young, celibate men? Where is he to turn, the poor fellow?’

He’s meant to turn to holy thoughts, isn’t he? And if that doesn’t work, he should hit it with a steel ruler. That’s what we were taught, and it never did us any harm. But he isn’t going to go quietly on this one, and it seems he’s not just talking about boys’ schools.

‘I remember we had one young Brother who was a very handsome twenty-year-old. Half the girls were in love with him.’

This stands out as a rare mention of girls in the national debate about abuse by the clergy. A caller goes on to suggest that girls were less likely to fall foul of dog-collared deviants as, unlike boys, they’d been trained in the art of resistance. They certainly had in our neck of the woods. The girls of Notre Dame High School, St Helens—separated from our all-boys regime only by a stream, and a frantically humming hormonal force-field—were warned not to wear patent leather or highly polished shoes, as men would look at the reflection of their underwear in them. When the miniskirt was the height of fashion, girls deemed indecently dressed had brown paper pelmets pinned to the hem of their gymslips, despite the clear risk of attack by sex-crazed Christian Brothers armed with Zippo lighters.

The debate continues for most of the otherwise dull two-hour drive to Galway. This seems to be the defining issue of the moment for the Irish, superseding even the North, Europe, and the economic boom in the popular consciousness. When a country has invested total trust and authority in the Church, as they did as recently as a generation ago, the trauma when the hidden truth emerges can only be guessed at by outsiders.

A former politician calls to suggest an annual day of remembrance for all victims; this is followed by a report that a bishop plans to walk the entire breadth of his county as an act of atonement. This seems a good idea. Perhaps it will catch on worldwide. You could see its attraction; especially in big places, like Texas, or the Northern Territory of Australia.

There’s a roundabout of such consummate ugliness on the Galway ring road that it would have been refused planning permission in New Jersey. You’d never dream you were within a mile of one of the loveliest city centres in the country. A tawdry mall of video boutiques and foam-backed carpet emporia festers beneath the golden arch of the giant ‘M’. Christ, you think, get me out of this place before I see the cut-price exhaust centre, or World of Leather.

But the most astonishing feature of this depressing landscape is the fact that by the side of the road, in every direction, women in tracksuits—stiff-backed, high-elbowed, bums out, in twos or threes or by themselves, in headphones or neck towels or smoking fags—are power walking. Perhaps it’s a virus that’s drifted across on a freakishly warm breeze from America. I wonder if the Unionists know about it? They wouldn’t want this sort of caper catching on in Portadown or Ballymena as a result of some subversive cross-border initiative. Imagine if the Orangemen all started walking like that. They’d look ridiculous.

It’s unseasonably hot as I drive into the city, and the place is seething with people. I head straight for the B&B I’ve booked in advance on the strength of the street name: Nuns’ Island. It turns out to be a splendid old house built in the 1730s with stone walls two feet thick. The river flows past the end of the back garden on its way to the salmon weir, and the sea is just a few hundred yards away. There’s a sign in my bathroom that says: ‘No Smoking (on Sundays and Holy Days)’.

Like every B&B landlady I have encountered so far, Mrs O’Flaherty is an honours graduate of a course in Celtic Hospitality Studies entitled ‘Be True To Your Most Eccentric Instincts’. She’s a big woman in a tweed skirt and what I eventually conclude, having eliminated all other possibilities, must be a turquoise mohair cape. A small jowly dog, coughing and wheezing like a Romanian asbestos miner who’s taken early retirement, peeps out from beneath a prodigious armpit. She never puts it down, and I have to concede the possibility it may be surgically attached.

‘I’ve lived all my life here,’ she tells me. ‘The city has a wonderful history. Did you know there was once a sign over the west gate of the town? It said “From the Ferocious O’Flahertys, Good Lord, Deliver Us”.’

She raises her eyebrows as if to say, ‘Well there you are then’, and gives me a potty but endearing smile.

‘The city was once ruled by fourteen English families called the Tribes of Galway. Did you know that? And do you know about the Lynch Stone?’

‘No,’ I say, but I bet I soon will.

In 1493 James Lynch FitzStephen, the mayor of Galway, went on a business trip to Spain. To thank his hosts for their hospitality, he took their only son back to Galway for a holiday. But FitzStephen had an only son of his own, who was involved in a passionate love affair. Fearing the Spaniard might be a rival, he accused him of trying to steal his girlfriend. The Spaniard, baffled, insisted he was only here for the oysters and the stout. This cut no ice with young Lynch, who stabbed him dead, then confessed to his father.

The mayor did what any father in his position would have done: he arrested and tried his son, found him guilty, and sentenced him to death. When an executioner couldn’t be found because the lad was so popular, he strung him up himself from an upstairs window of his house, in front of a fascinated but unenthusiastic crowd.

‘So is that where the expression “to lynch someone” comes from?’ I ask.

‘Do you know,’ says Mrs O’Flaherty, ‘I haven’t a bleddy clue.’

Outside in the street there’s a Poor Clare convent on one side, and the Samaritans on the other, making it one of the world’s top destinations for suicidal nuns. The Poor Clares are a silent order, so the counselling sessions could drag on a bit.

As I approach the centre of town there’s a definite hint of music in the air. When I was last in Alice Springs they were trying to throw off its long-standing image as a violent outback hell-hole by piping muzak into the streets. You would walk along in 110 degrees of heat, past poverty-stricken Aborigines, tattooed amputee bikers, and malevolent pit bulls, your face covered in enormous flies, to the reassuring sound of the James Last orchestra playing ‘Wichita Lineman’. Hey, you were meant to think, it’s completely normal here. Everything’s just fine.

I only mention this because Galway has made a giant leap forward with the concept of outdoor muzak: there is live music everywhere. In the street where all the shops are, which I’m pleased to discover is called Shop Street, a Basque woman is singing unaccompanied ballads. A few yards away a gossamer-winged fairy of indeterminate sex is standing on a metal post playing the flute. Just up the street a glamorous young Breton with a fiddle is jamming with a fat hippy on uilleann pipes. I pause for a moment at the foot of the stairs leading up to the restaurant where the freckly girls in Suzie Wong dresses charged me ₤9 for noodles. They’re gone up to ₤12. Galway must be doing well.

I elbow my way through the throng of musicians and install myself on the first floor of an old-style coffee house with wood panelling and big fireplaces, looking out over Shop Street. I use the pay phone to call my friend Noel. The last time I was here he took me up a mountainside in Connemara with a seventy-eight-year-old poteen-maker who’d learned his craft as a teenager from his father. We spent the day watching him double-distill brown bog water in two oil drums over a turf fire into something that tasted like the finest malt. Noel acted as interpreter, as the old man spoke no English. Perhaps he’ll have another adventure in store for me this time.

A lady in what sounds like a sensible blouse answers the phone at the place where he works.

‘Noel? Oh, I’m afraid he’s on holidays. I’d say he’ll be away another week. I think he’s gone to London.’

I don’t know anyone else in Galway.

Shirt-sleeved crowds are enjoying a drink in the sunshine outside the bars on Quay Street. There are lots of Spanish people, apparently undeterred by the 1493 stabbing; but as I settle at a table on the corner outside O’Neachtains, I’m struck by how many visitors seem to come from Northern Ireland. There’s a group of five women across the street, drinking in loud voices; a family with hyperactive hungry children, arguing about burgers; and two tough-looking men in their thirties, lurking behind pints at the table next to me. All have Belfast accents. One of the guys notices me listening to his conversation and catches my eye.

‘How are ya?’

Half an hour later we’ve had two drinks, and they’ve explained to me why there are so many Ulster accents on the streets of Galway. It’s marching season in the North, and lots of people like to get away from the mood of confrontation. I’m presuming they’re from one of the nationalist areas, but how can I find out without sounding too obvious? I’ll have to be tactful.

‘So…er…you must be Catholic then?’

Now why on earth did I say that?

‘Am I fuck!’

Oh God. This is where they take me off to a piece of wasteland and put a bullet through my head.

‘I am,’ says his friend, laughing, ‘but he’s a fecking Prod. We come down here together every year. Make a weekend of it.’

‘Aye,’ says his friend, ‘or a week.’

Three bars later I realise it’s that uncomfortable time of day when you either have to decide to go for a meal, and I mean right now, or accept that you’ve renounced solids for the rest of the day in the interests of research. What about the place with the twelve-quid noodles? Perhaps we could go there now, and eat some?

‘Don’t be so fecking daft. You’re on holiday. You can eat when you’re at home. Have a bag of nuts, why don’t ya? Same again, is it?’

Later we go down to the docks to what they promise is one of the roughest pubs in town.

‘You’ll be all right with us, mind.’

Course I will. A pair of pugnacious Ulstermen with ten pints inside them is a virtual guarantee of a quiet night. The pub’s clientèle are ravaged-looking, but friendly, and the landlady couldn’t be nicer. Two old guys have just started playing flute and mandolin, when a young man in his twenties walks in carrying a violin case. His long black hair is in a ponytail, and a straggly moustache and goatee beard complete the bohemian credentials. He hovers near the musos for a while, then begins to play. Heads turn. I move closer to watch. His fingers are long and slender and seem unnaturally flexible. He’s playing the traditional tunes with a rare delicacy.