McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (42 page)

In the small hours of the morning I wake, suddenly, in a sweat, to a moment of blinding revelation, and sit there in the dark, trembling. Maybe the mountain has worked its magic after all. The village idiot with the spoons? Of course. It was Bono! The musician in the nylon wig and shades? Christy Moore. The big fat guy in the yellow shirt? Van Morrison. They don’t fool me.

But they needn’t worry. The dark secret of Irish music is safe with me.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that you cannot make a road movie in England. Everywhere is too close to everywhere else. By mid-afternoon on Day One, you’ll just run out of road and have to turn back. But in America, spiritual home of the road movie, there is space into infinity, you can drive for a week, and the road just goes on for ever.

At first glance, the distances involved in traversing the west of Ireland might seem small, yet paradoxically this would be prime road movie territory, Kerouacesque or Wenderish in its potential. Here you can drive all day and the road still goes on for ever, because for large parts of it you will be driving at twenty miles an hour behind an agricultural conveyance. You will also have the benefit of a wealth of wrong turnings to choose from, an option not available when you’re sitting motionless outside Birmingham in the centre lane of the M6 motorway on a Friday night. Thelma and Louise could have escaped to Connemara instead of Arizona, and had more fun into the bargain, but they wouldn’t have got much joy in the West Midlands of England.

So you need to be patient. Although you may have a fixed destination in mind—Lough Derg for example—you must not pursue it with the single-minded fury of a sales rep from Leicester who has an appointment in Newcastle, but wants to be back in Bristol in time for a dinner party with the director of marketing and his over-manicured ex-beautician wife. You must never divide the distance by seventy-five miles an hour, and say that’s when you’ll be there; that way, madness lies. Dublin, and its ever-increasing sphere of influence, operates increasingly along such alien notions as a full appointment book, designated quality time, and death by stress. But once you cross the Shannon—even though geographically you have only come a short distance—different rules of time apply, and most people still understand the crucial secret of human happiness: that it’s better to do a few things slowly, than a lot of things fast.

I find myself contemplating this eternal truth as I sit becalmed behind an impressive quantity of steaming pigshit on the road from Westport to Knock. If this were a road movie, just think of the tension if there were some bad guys chasing me a few miles back down the road. Right now, they’d be leaning on the horn, gunning the engine of their black BMW, and sitting motionless in the middle of a procession to a roadside grotto of Our Lady. The villain—Tim Roth—would lean forward and tap the driver on the shoulder.

‘So, how long till Lough Derg?’

The driver—played by that huge, scary ginger guy with the tash, who plays all the psychopaths in anything set in Glasgow—turns round as a priest in a surplice and biretta walks past, followed by an old lady in black, some heifers, and six altar boys carrying a weeping statue of the Virgin.

‘Christ only knows.’

The priest hears him and bangs on the window with his holy water brush. Psycho turns off the engine, and another few minutes evaporate into the Celtic ether.

Meanwhile, back in real life, just a few miles up the road, the pigshit consignment has turned off to make its delivery at a chicken feed factory, and I’m tooling along an empty lane at an impressive forty, gripped as ever by the rich pageant of unexpected obsessions unfolding on the radio phone-ins.

‘I’d like to draw attention to the disturbing trend of young kids to hang around near the goalposts in park football matches.’

‘What are you getting at, Fergus? Do you mean they’re not putting enough effort into the game?’

‘I mean they’re not even in the game! They stand near the goal, and when the ball comes, they run off with it.’

‘Well, I agree. If that’s true, it definitely is a disturbing trend.’

Strictly speaking, Knock isn’t on the direct route from Westport to Sligo; but as there’s no way of knowing whether the direct route would get you there any quicker than a random zigzag, there’s no reason not to go there. I figure it might be a good place to stop for lunch. In the road movie, I’d be sitting in a café window, eating wild smoked salmon on home-made soda bread, when Tim Roth and Psycho thunder past in the BMW without seeing me, scattering aged nuns and infirm priests in their wake. They have failed to understand that there’s no point in rushing when you’re out west. In Connaught, as in life, nothing is gained by getting ahead of whatever it is you’re chasing.

Since 1879, when a vision of Our Lady is said to have appeared there, Knock has been the Lourdes of Ireland, with a hugely popular annual pilgrimage season. As I arrive, there’s a large banner draped across a roundabout in the middle of the road. ‘Up Mayo—Good Luck Peter’, it says, which by anyone’s standards is a marvellous welcome. Either it’s a message for the local lad who’s playing for Mayo in the big match this weekend, or another miracle, solely for my benefit. I park and start looking for somewhere suitable to have lunch. ‘Up Mayo—Come in Peter and Have Your Lunch’—that’s the sort of thing I’m hoping for.

Not long ago, Knock was a little village with a little shrine. But then they built a huge modernist basilica complex with eighteen, I counted ’em, eighteen self-service holy water fountains. Thanks to the efforts of a high-energy wheeling and dealing monsignor, there’s also a new airport with a runway big enough to take the largest jumbos. Pilgrims can now jet in from Adelaide or Chicago without having to faff around spending money in Dublin or Shannon. One of the consequences of this fly in, pray, buy stuff, fly out conveyor belt is an economy driven by the kitsch souvenir industry.

The shops are all named after saints—St Peter’s, St Mark’s and so on—presumably to indicate divine endorsement. I remember, years ago, in Skegness, there used to be a shop called His Place, where you could buy balloons that said, ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life’. Clearly evangelical artefacts have moved on a bit since then. ‘Official World Millennium Candle as seen on The Late Late Show’, says a sign in the window. ‘Kneeling Nun Dolls—Only £14.99.’ These come with rosary beads, John Lennon glasses and piercing blue eyes as standard. I’m strangely drawn, though, to the white plaster busts of Jesus’s head. They’re lightly dusted in glitter, with a dayglo purple crown of thorns, and are guaranteed to change colour according to the weather. You can see how that would come in handy. But my favourite, at a keenly priced £1.59, is a Sacred Tax Disc Holder. This comes complete with Motorist’s Prayer, ‘May the Lord Grant a Safe Journey to All Who Travel in This Vehicle’, and is guaranteed to deter the most devout traffic warden.

I’m aware that pilgrims come here—as they do to Croagh Patrick—with the most sincere of motives, but the gulf between the two places couldn’t be greater. I’m hungry, but I don’t think I want to eat in a town so dedicated to separating the visitor from his cash. I go back to the car, put my tax disc in the sacred holder, and stick it on the windscreen. It seems like a good time to check my oil and water, which I don’t recall doing since the service area at the Severn Bridge on my way to Wales. But the release catch under the dashboard isn’t working. Something’s jammed, and I can’t get it open. I search the main street, but there’s no sign of a Sacred Heart Volvo Dealership. I’ll just have to drive on in a permanently sealed unit of impenetrable rattling metal. The last of the bird blew out some days ago, but who knows what other horrors lie in store now?

On the edge of town I pass a row of guest-houses: Basilica View, St Brendan’s, Divine Mercy B&B; but before divine mercy, I have to face the cleansing fire of purgatory. I’m in the home straight to Donegal and Lough Derg, in a car that could go bang and die in a plume of acrid smoke at any moment. My fate is in the lap of God, or the gods, or my own existentially pure actions, depending on your theological point of view.

After driving for the best part of an hour I see a turn-off for the village of Tubbercurry. Because my brain is addled from travelling on my own for so long, it strikes me that it would be amusing to have lunch in an Indian restaurant here. Unfortunately no one’s had the foresight to open one yet, so I have to get a sandwich instead. As I sit in the car eating it, I notice I’m parked outside a florist’s called Guns ’n’ Roses, which may be the world’s first paramilitary flower shop.

On the radio a panel is discussing whether brothels should be legalised, which isn’t the kind of thing you’d have heard here a few years ago. The presenter is trying to remain neutral, but one of the panellists, a colourful, loquacious, and possibly intoxicated old journalist, isn’t standing for that.

‘Ah, you’ve been too long at RTE. I can remember when you had opinions of your own. Come on, tell us what you think.’

‘First you tell us. What do you think about legalised brothels?’

‘I think they’re unnecessary.’

‘Unnecessary?’

‘Yes. What’s the point of going to a brothel if you can make a phone call and get the girl to come to you?’

There are gasps of disbelief from the other panellists. You can almost hear the chairman’s jaw drop open.

‘God almighty! You can’t say that.’

‘I’ll say what I like.’

There’s shouting in the background now, and a clumsy but unsuccessful attempt to get him off-mic. But the journo won’t be stopped. He starts shouting at the presenter.

‘Look at him! Look at him! His eyes are rolling back in his face. There’s spittle rolling down his chin. He’s going all red! He’s worried he’s going to lose his precious job!’

I drive on, but happily it goes on like this for another half an hour, keeping me smiling all the way to Sligo.

Sligo’s situation is particularly charming. Bold limestone hills dominate it to the North, while on the East side is the picturesque Lough Gill. The port occupies a site which was of first class importance from the earliest days. A great thoroughfare between North and South led to the ford across the Garavogue. Sligo was the birthplace in 1865 of W B Yeats, the famous poet.

The prose isn’t up to Thackeray’s usual standard, but that’s because Thackeray never made it this far, so he didn’t write it. I’ve been keeping an eye out for an alternative source of antiquarian information to illuminate my journey. The
Automobile Association Illustrated Road Book of Ireland 1963
(including Gazetteer, Itineraries, Maps and Town Plans) fits the bill. It kicks off with ‘A dedication to the reader in Ogham, the ancient Irish linear writing’.

‘Bendacht For Cech N-Oen Legfas,’ it says. ‘A blessing on all who shall read this,’ a rather beautiful and anachronistic way to begin a guidebook. With its evocative black and white drawings, grid maps, and advice—‘High speeds and comfort do not go together because of the undulating nature of the roads’—the book effortlessly conjures up a past long buried under new tarmac. It brings back the smell of leather seats in the Ford Consul we had when I was a kid. I remember it being hoisted on board the Dun Laoghaire boat in a giant sling at Holyhead Docks, in the days before Drive On, Drink Up, Drive Off ferries. Its registration mark—EHH 604—is forever printed on my mind, even though I couldn’t tell you the Tank’s number, or the one on my car in England, if my life depended on it.