McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (34 page)

Perhaps I’m being hard on the English. They, or we, are a very private race, which isn’t something of which you could ever accuse the Irish. I think it’d be impossible for one stranger to pass another in rural Ireland and not acknowledge the moment, and this is one of the defining differences between our two nations.

The dogs are different, too. I’ve passed several on this afternoon’s walk, and not one of them has even bothered to bark. One actually walked with me for half a mile to keep me company. They don’t seem to have caught on to the notion that prevails among dogs in the rest of Europe—that they’re meant to be defending stuff from you. They will, however, chase any car that passes, though I suspect this may be a legal requirement enforceable by the gardai.

‘Ah, good evening Mrs O’Riordan. Sorry to be bothering you, but I hear a Toyota Corolla went past earlier today, and Boru just lay there like a plank.’

‘I’m sorry about that now, Sergeant. Next time I’ll smack him on the nuts with a hurley.’

‘Good luck now.’

‘Good luck.’

Dara’s not in. He’s gone out for a meeting, so in a way Inishmore is just like Soho. Tess invites me in to meet the twins, who are girls, smiling and gorgeous. I’m surprised to find there’s a two-year-old boy as well. I have some tea and watch
Teletubbies
in Irish, which is a steep learning curve. I agree to come back and spend the day with Dara tomorrow. In the meantime I take a couple of copies of the magazine they publish, the
Aisling Quarterly
—its motto ‘Rooted in the Celtic, Living in right relationship, Working for transformation’—borrow a bike and head off for Dun Aengus.

The bike has a penitentially hard seat. I head west along the northern shore of the island, the mountains of Connemara still pink on the other side of the bay. Seabirds and seals are sunning themselves at the water’s edge. There are no people. On either side of the narrow road, tiny postage-stamp fields stretch off into the distance, divided up by more dry-stone walls than I’ve ever seen in my life. At some point in the past, these stones were picked from the ground to create the fields. The plots are so small, and the walls so numerous, because of the poverty, and also because there were so many bloody stones that, you didn’t want to be carrying them far. If you’d made big fields, the walls would have been about forty feet high.

Large parts of the fields are simply giant slabs of grey limestone. Occasional cows graze in the tiny green patches that are peppered between the rocks. The ruins of thousand-year-old churches, built from the same rock, dot the gently sloping hillside. The entire landscape is a breathtaking study in elemental grey and green. After half an hour of brutal impalement on the unyielding, anthracite-hard saddle, I see Dun Aengus silhouetted on the hilltop ahead of me. Bikes and vehicles have to be left behind. If you want to continue, you have to go on foot.

Thank God for that.

Dun Aengus is a ring fort dating from about 1100 BC. Once described as ‘the most magnificent barbaric monument extant in Europe’, it sits on the summit of a cliff that falls 300 feet sheer into the sea. Its massive, horseshoe-shaped stone walls, enclosing a central living area, terminate on either side at the cliff’s edge. You wouldn’t want to sleepwalk.

As I climb the hillside a steady trickle of visitors, many of whom I recognise from this morning’s boat, are on their way down. I’m flanked on either side by enormous slabs of stone, stretching off as far as the eye can see. Whoever built it must have carved the blocks straight out of the ground. However they achieved it, the whole enterprise suggests a high level of social cohesion and organisation. Two further outer walls were added many hundreds of years after the original was built. As you go through the second of these, you pass the spot where the headless skeletons of a man and a boy were found during excavations in the 1990s. The remains dated from the Viking period. Vikings versus the guys who lived here; that must have been some match.

It’s one of those places that send a frisson of electricity coursing through you. The water pounding the rocks below sounds like explosions in a distant quarry. I’d been told in Galway that the thing to do is lie on your stomach, edge forward, and peer down over the drop, but I’d rather crawl five miles naked over broken glass with Gary Glitter on my back.

Perhaps I’m a bit dim, but I hadn’t expected the view. From this point, looking back in the direction I’ve come, you see both sides of the island, and the ocean on either side. To my left is Galway and Connemara, which I was prepared for; but to my right are the Cliffs of Moher, twenty miles away on mainland County Clare. To the south of them, far, far to the south, is more coastline, and mountains, and finally, on the distant, crystal-clear horizon, one massive mountain. The next day a guy in a shop tells me it was Mount Brandon, seventy-five miles away in the Dingle Peninsula, but he might have said that to make me happy.

There are only a handful of other people up here, and I’m tuning into the mood of the place, wondering who the builders were, when I hear a rumbling sound in the distance, like a low-level aircraft approaching at speed. Suddenly the sound bursts through the stone archway into the inner sanctum. It’s the student from the ferry, this time elaborating on her plans for Thanksgiving. As I turn to leave, she and her friend are approaching the edge, where she’s about to attempt the first direct communication with the United States using human voice alone.

Or perhaps her friend, patient, long-suffering, but devious, is about to nudge her to her death on the rocks below. I don’t hang around to find out.

In a little hut near the foot of the hill I buy a hand-knit sweater from a lady who tells me she makes them for Sharon Stone.

Back in Kilronan at the end of the day I sit outside Joe Mac’s pub looking over the harbour. The water turns purple and green as I watch the sun go down on Galway Bay, which seems suitably kitsch. Over a couple of languid pints I browse through the
Aisling Quarterly
. It opens with an article by Dara Molloy about the imposition of uniformity of worship once Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire. By the twelfth century Celtic Christianity had been all but obliterated.

Christianity had now created the first multinational product. Religious expression had been stripped of its diversity, its cultural and geographical connections, its integration with seasons, climate and local festivals…just as McDonalds is recognisable for its premises and its food no matter where it is situated in the world, so Christianity had done the same. It was Christianity that gave McDonalds the idea.

I wonder if the local priest had him tarred and feathered when he turned up here saying things like that? I must remember to ask. In the absence of McDonald’s I take myself off to a little seafood and pizza place. Unfortunately, the waitress says the seafood platter’s off, the crab claws are off, and the mozzarella and pepperoni are off. Such are the rigours of island life. I settle for a salad, a steak, and an early night.

Back in my room there’s a note saying someone’s been in to mend the window. Unfortunately they’ve applied a potentially lethal cocktail of solvents and gloss paint to the offending area. It’s a warm evening, and the heating’s been left on, so it’s like being in a bodywork and paint spray shop in Mexico City. In fumes like this you’d need a protective mask to check your car oil, let alone sleep. My eyes are watering, and there must be less than a fifty-fifty chance of my surviving the night.

I pull the sheets over my head and slip off into a deep and toxic slumber. I’m woken just the once, by my own cries, from a nightmare in which I’m trapped on a cliff edge in a car whose lethal exhaust fumes are changing into poisonous birds.

‘In 1985, when I came here, the island had ten thousand tourists. This year it’ll be two hundred thousand.’

It’s mid-morning, and I’m examining a standing stone with Dara. It’s marked with primitive Celtic crosses, carved perhaps a thousand years ago on a monument that even then had already been here for a very long time. The walk over after breakfast served as an excellent solvent-abuse detox session. In defiance of all known precedent, it’s another lovely day. So has tourism mined the islanders’ way of life?

‘Not at all. There used to be just fishing or emigration. Now there’s a choice. People can choose to stay. Some are even coming back from America.’

He’s in his forties, with thick dark greying hair and beard, and exudes a gentle charisma. The house they’ve built overlooking the shore, where volunteers come and live while helping produce the magazine or working on the organic garden, is just above us, but hidden by a rocky outcrop. This tiny piece of land between the house and the beach is rich in ancient sites: there are several standing stones and Celtic crosses, a holy well, a salmon pool that features in Irish mythology, a Viking burial, a ruined early Christian church, and an unconsecrated children’s cemetery. On Sundays Dara says his own version of mass out here in the open air. At other times he leads pilgrims in the rounds—a traditional Celtic spiritual practice, believed to have originated in pre-Christian times, but practised by the early monks who populated Inishmore from the fifth century onwards. The pilgrims walk clockwise round the holy well, praying as they go, counting out the seven rounds with pebbles.

Most of the standing stones are taller than we are. A couple of them are carved with designs that have been found nowhere else. The one next to the church is drilled with a circular hole, through which lovers have traditionally threaded a handkerchief while making a wish. Isn’t this the kind of practice, I wonder, that gained the Irish a reputation for superstition rather than religion?

‘That’s a very fine distinction. After all, what’s a prayer if it isn’t a wish?’

The children’s graveyard, close to the water’s edge, is a deeply atmospheric place. Children who died before being baptised were laid here, in unconsecrated ground. A jumble of uninscribed stones marks the confusion of graves.

‘There’s a woman in her seventies, still living here, who remembers when she was a child a baby being buried here, at midnight with no priest present. There was a lot of shame. It was a terrible thing.’

After lunch of bread and cheese, we walk to the highest point of the island where there’s another fort. On the way up, I ask him about his abandonment of his vow of chastity.

‘Fatherhood really suits me. It’s made me complete.’

Parenthood, I say, opens up a part of us men that we never knew existed.

‘I know. And it’s a very big part.’

I wonder whether he’s ahead of the game; will the Church one day abandon celibacy? He doesn’t think so.

‘The post-Celtic Church has been organised on the model of the Roman Empire, with a single patriarch at the top from whom all authority flows. It’s structured like an army, so that everyone will obey without question. Celibacy is a method of control. A passionate devotion outside the job might subvert the structure.’

The fort of Dun Eochia is smaller and less frequently visited than Dun Aengus, and we have the place to ourselves. From up here the island looks like a block of sheer stone, the patches of grass just lichen on a rock. A goat is bleating in the distance.