McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (35 page)

‘This is one of my favourite places on the island. The Celts believed that our world and the spirit world are very close, and that there are particular places of energy where the divide is very thin, and it’s possible to step across to the other side. I think this is one of those places.’

It seems like a good place to ask the renegade priest the million-dollar question.

‘So do you believe in God?’

A pause.

‘Do you believe in a life after death where we’ll be aware of ourselves as individuals, where we’ll be able to say, “Oh, hi, Mike, nice to see you again”?’

He smiles. ‘I’d have to say my beliefs have changed in the fifteen years I’ve been here. I absolutely believe in a spirit world. I believe we’re close to it here.’

He looks around.

‘And I believe religion should serve the people from the ground up, not from the top down. It must nurture their souls, or it is nothing. But as to whether, once my body’s in the ground, I’ll be conscious of myself as a separate entity—I’m not sure I will. I suppose…’ He chuckles. ‘Perhaps you’d have to say I was an agnostic.’

I’ve never met an agnostic priest before, so I feel I should tell him what the country and western detective novelist Kinky Friedman has to say on the subject of belief. ‘I’m a Jehovah’s Bystander. We believe in a supreme being, but we just don’t want to get involved.’

There’s a beautifully carved Celtic cross in the centre of Kilronan, if a place so small can have a centre. It was carved by James Pearse of Dublin, father of Patrick Pearse, a leader of the 1916 Easter Rising. In the evening teenage kids hang around it, smoking and flirting like they do in bus shelters and shopping precincts in busier parts of the world. Behind it, there’s a pub called the American Bar. I don’t know why it’s called that. Dara said this afternoon that the islanders have always looked to the west: emigration usually meant Boston or Chicago or San Francisco, rarely Dublin or London. To my ear, there’s a strong touch of American in the local accent, but whether that’s an accent they sent to the States, or one that’s been brought here by returning emigrants, I couldn’t say, and nor could anyone I asked.

But that’s the accent I hear when they’re speaking English, which in most cases is a second language. In the American Bar tonight everyone seems to be speaking Irish but me. It could be Hungarian or Basque for all I can understand. Out here the language defines who you are, as does the gene pool, which has remained relatively undisturbed over the centuries. It’s a magical place, but I’m not naïve enough to imagine myself living here, as I usually do in places I really like. My landlady’s sitting over there in the corner, but the place is packed and I don’t think she’s noticed me. Four men are playing fiddle, accordion, flute and guitar, and a drunken old boy with overgrown hair and big clumpy boots is dancing up a storm in front of them.

‘Wow! It’s like a Guinness ad or a scene from that Tom Cruise movie,’ says a loud and familiar voice behind me.

‘Gahd! Imagine if you could, like, live here?’

Her friend didn’t chuck her off the cliff, then.

Feels like bedtime to me.

The paint and glue fumes had pretty much dissipated when I got back, and I enjoyed a relatively hallucination-free night. I think Mammy may have stayed out late, because at breakfast this morning I was served by her eight-year-old daughter. She said, ‘You’re welcome,’ and ‘Have a nice day,’ which was a bit of a worry.

I’ve spent the day walking and reading and digesting what I’ve heard. I bought an excellent
Pocket Guide to Árainn
, by Dara O’Maoildhia, which I later found out translates as Dara Molloy. I’d recommend it if you’re ever out this way. Don’t borrow his bike though. My arse is destroyed.

I’ve just boarded the afternoon ferry. About twenty minutes ago I was browsing without intent to purchase in the biggest and most expensive sweater shop in town, when suddenly the door flew open and in poured two dozen Japanese people in designer clothes, some of them running. One woman started shouting. ‘Best stock!’ she shrilled. ‘Best stock! Best stock!’ A smiling assistant pointed her in the direction of the most ruinously expensive handknits, and I headed for the boat.

They’ve just turned up in their bus. They can’t have been in there ten minutes, but judging by the carrier bags they’ve pumped enough cash into the local economy to pay someone to clear the island of stones. I’ve got a seat on the open deck. As we pull away from the jetty, I can see Dun Eochia silhouetted on the skyline on top of the island. It sets me thinking about something Dara said as we were on our way down. I think he may have made sense of my Anglo-Irish identity crisis.

I’m in a restaurant in Cong, in County Mayo, waiting for my main course to arrive. The omens aren’t good. Vegetable of the Day is Mexican Potatoes; and when I went upstairs to the loo a few minutes ago, two hysterical teenage girls burst out of the living-room with lollipops stuck up their noses, sticky end first. The couple at the next table to me are listening to the conversation of the people at the table next to them, and openly discussing it. I’m listening to all four of them, but mostly I’m reading the newspaper.

‘He was walking down the middle of Washington Street. He was as totally naked as the day he was born.’

These were the words spoken by Garda Rice as he gave evidence in court. The report continues: ‘The two gardai were on a midnight patrol in the city centre when they came upon the two nude doctors, a court sitting was told.

‘Two British doctors—a cardiologist and a psychiatrist, both of whom are due to sit examinations to be consultants—were in Cork on one of their stag weekends, when they walked about naked in the city centre just after midnight.’

In fairness to the Scots and Welsh, I should point out that the paralytic quacks weren’t British, so much as English. It’s an Irish paper, so I suppose the confusion is fair enough. The English press, of course, have got this nationality business down to a fine art. If you win an Olympic medal, an Oscar, or the George Cross, then you’re British; unless you’re involved in a sex scandal, a drugs deal, or a court case, in which case you’re once again Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, or black.

The report is worrying on two counts. It reminds us once again how naïve we are to entrust our health and well-being to ex-medical students. Why on earth do doctors drink so much? I suppose it gives them something to do while they’re smoking. But more troubling than the profession of the inebriated nudes is their location, and the fact that they weren’t the only ones at it. ‘Three other English’—there you are, they got it right that time—‘visitors for stag parties that weekend,’ concludes the report, ‘were arrested for being nude, in public, in Cork.’ It brings to mind the South Uist hedgehog catastrophe.

There were no hedgehogs on the island of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides until 1974, when some bright spark imported seven of them in a disastrous attempt to control the slug population in his garden. Today, there are an estimated 6,000, advancing ever northwards in a relentless, spiky tide that cannot be resisted. And as they progress, they’re devouring the eggs of rare birds, and so inflicting dramatic and permanent upheaval on the fragile eco-balance.

The unsettling case of the nude English doctors suggests to me that something akin to the South Uist rogue hedgehog scenario is happening with English stag parties in Ireland. Not so long ago, English bridegrooms and their flabby, bevvied-up entourages wouldn’t have considered Ireland a suitable venue for their desperate rituals. Then, as air fares began to drop, and word got out that Ireland was a very cool place, a few ground-breaking best men organised the first wave of prenuptial weekends on the booze. They might have eaten birds’ eggs too. It’s plausible, given their subsequent track record.

Anyway, some years down the line, Dublin is now saturated. It can take no more Londoners in false rubber breasts, no more comatose Liverpudlians chained to lamp posts with boot polish on their genitals, no more nude doctors. So now they have spread, like egg-slurping hedgehogs, to Cork. Waterford will be next. There have already been sightings in Galway. Politicians of all parties must mobilise resistance. The EC should give Ireland massive amounts of money, no questions asked, one more time. As flights get even cheaper, and new airports open in the far west and north, nowhere is safe. The Irish way of life is under threat as never before. Unless a nation is prepared to make a stand, hopelessly drunken doctors may achieve what a thousand years of English landowners, politicians and soldiers could not.

Trust me, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been to South Uist. I’ve met the guy who fastens the little flashing lights on the hedgehogs and follows them at night, and he’s not as mad as he sounds. I’ve seen what the prickly little bastards can do.

Mind you, I wouldn’t mind the stag nights coming here, to Cong. That might wipe the smile off a few of the smug faces I’ve seen tonight. This place has put me in a bad mood. It deserves all the nude doctors Britain can send.

Cong sits on a spur of land between Lough Corrib to the south, and Lough Mask to the north, with the Joyce Country and spectacular rivers and mountains of Connemara to the west. I remembered it as a delightful little place with an almost fairytale feel about it. It’s famous for its splendid twelfth-century ruined abbey, and also for the Cross of Cong: a richly-jewelled processional cross from the same period, regarded as one of the finest European works of art of the era, that is now in the National Museum in Dublin.
The Quiet Man
, the John Ford movie starring John Wayne, was also filmed in Cong. Among the village’s many engagingly non-mainstream attractions is the Dry Canal, a doomed nineteenth-century attempt to link the two loughs. After five years’ digging, water was released into the canal, and immediately disappeared, because it had been dug on porous limestone. What a hilarious Irish joke this would be, were it not for the fact that the engineer in charge of the project was British. Sorry, English.